How Sprints Work

7 min read

A sprint is a 10-week execution window. You pick one ambitious goal, break it into weekly objectives, and execute with full visibility and accountability.

The 10-Week Framework

Ten weeks is long enough to accomplish something meaningful, short enough to maintain urgency. It's the same timeframe YC uses for their batches... enough time to transform a company.

Setting Your North Star

Every sprint starts with one question: What's the single most important thing you need to accomplish in the next 10 weeks?

This becomes your North Star. It should be linked to your primary KPI, the metric that matters most for your business. For most startups, this is revenue. For some, it's active users, pilots, or key milestones.

Make It Ambitious

Your North Star should be a bit scary. If you know exactly how you'll hit it, it's probably not ambitious enough.

The purpose is to motivate you to move quickly. A scary goal forces you to work harder, move faster, and think more creatively. Part of running a sprint is establishing the top speed of your company.

We believe it's better to get 50% of the way toward a goal that is 3x harder than you would have otherwise set. When you increase your goal high enough, you often have to completely rethink your approach... which can create better outcomes.

Example: You plan to schedule 10 customer interviews because you know 10 people who might do it. But if the goal is 50, you have to figure out a new channel. You hack something together, get in front of more people, and end up with 15+ interviews scheduled. More than you would have gotten playing it safe.

The Goal Is For You (and Your Accountability Partners)

Your North Star is not for investors or the outside world. It's for you, your co-founders, and your team. Set an ambitious goal to encourage yourself to push harder, work faster, and be more effective.

It's also for your accountability partners. The North Star tells them where you want to end up. Their job is to apply pressure. Without that pressure, founders naturally take longer, back off on goals, and lose urgency. Your accountability partners help you maintain the pace you committed to.

Don't twist or contort what you're building to hit your goal. If you find yourself changing your customer or product just to make the numbers look good, stop. The goal serves the company, not the other way around.

If You're Pre-Product

If you're at the idea stage or pivoting, your North Star should be to launch a product and get your first users to love it. For consumer products, aim for 10 users who love it. For enterprise, aim for 5-10 users who love the demo and want to help you secure a pilot.

Milestones

Milestones are checkpoints along the way to your North Star. They're what you work backward to create: a clear picture of execution over the next couple weeks.

Startups are chaotic. Things evolve quickly. Trying to set detailed goals several weeks out is challenging and they almost always change. Milestones solve this by being long enough to require real work, but not so long that you can back off the pressure.

Examples:

Week 3: Launch beta to first 10 users
Week 5: First paying customer
Week 7: Hit 50 customers
Week 10: Reach 100 customers

Without intermediate checkpoints, you'll be surprised to find a month before your sprint ends that your goal is now out of reach.

Weekly Rhythm

Each week follows a simple pattern:

Start of week: Set 3-5 weekly goals that move you toward your next milestone
During the week: Execute on those goals
End of week: Mark each goal as done, partial, or not done
Weekly Retro: Reflect on what worked and what didn't

When your milestones are set, prioritizing weekly goals becomes easier. Ask yourself: What are the 3-5 things that, if accomplished, do the most to unlock that next milestone? Those are your weekly goals. See Writing Great Weekly Goals for more.

The Weekly Retro

The Weekly Retro is primarily for you. It's self-reflection to help you honestly look in the mirror about what worked and what didn't.

Yes, your accountability partners also receive it. But the retro is not meant to be a place where you talk your way out of things or spin a narrative about why something didn't work.

The point of Pre and accountability partners is Show Don't Tell. Your work should show the impact. If you spin narrative to wiggle out of the discomfort of a bad week, you're sabotaging your main pressure mechanism.

If You're Crushing Every Week

If you have all green weeks and you're hitting 100% of your goals, you're probably not pushing hard enough.

Some red is healthy. It means you're setting goals that actually challenge you. A sprint with some missed goals but aggressive targets often produces better outcomes than a sprint where you play it safe.

Sprints are not about perfection. They're about consistent execution and honest assessment. A sprint with some red weeks is still valuable if you learned why and adjusted.

Focus on the Next Few Turns

Pre is focused on helping founders go from Ideation to Validation to Traction. If you're going 0 to 0.5 or 0 to 1, your company isn't even fully alive yet. Don't worry about it dying.

In fact, you may want to kill it as soon as possible so you can pivot to a better opportunity. That's fine. The sprint will help you figure that out faster.

Think of it like racing. Yes, understand what the rest of the course looks like. But only focus on the next couple turns so you hit each one at the optimal speed and angle, exit on the ideal line, and set yourself up for the next turn. And the next. And the next.

Founders too early start worrying about long-term issues. Should we trademark? Will investors give us money? Stop. Punt expenses as far as possible. There's no point paying thousands of dollars for a trademark on an idea that will be dead in 12 weeks. Don't worry about how to get investors to give you money. Build a startup that investors want to give money to.

Revising Your Plan

You'll likely revise your goals during the sprint as you get feedback from users. That's fine. Your plan is a draft based on your current understanding, not something written in stone.

The point is to have a plan, execute against it, learn, and adjust. That's the loop.

What Happens at Week 10

At the end of a sprint, you have a clear record of what you accomplished, week by week. You can see patterns, identify what worked, and decide what your next sprint should focus on.

Then you start a new sprint with a new North Star.