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What if two days is all your team needs to find direction?
Good morning.
Every product team has that one person who sees the gap before anyone else.
They bring it up in meetings. They pitch it informally. They keep saying: there's something here.
And most of the time, nobody stops to look.
This is what happened at a French company I worked with. Two days changed everything.
In today's newsletter:
The sprint nobody planned
Why teams stay stuck before they even start
Jake Knapp's Foundation Sprint — finally, a name for what I did years ago
How to run one in two days
Conviction without facts
She had been saying it for months.
There's a gap between our offering and the target market. New technology can close it.
Nobody stopped to look.
Not because she was wrong because she had no facts. Just conviction. Every product team was busy with their own priorities.
Then the CEO stepped in. He didn't want more meetings. He didn't want another presentation.
He wanted to see the problem. Something factual. Something real.
Everyone was busy. Nobody was looking.
The team had been going back and forth for six months. Not because they lacked ideas because nobody could name the one problem worth solving.
They knew the customer.
They knew the pain points.
But the one real problem? Still unclear.
Most of the team didn't even know where to start. They didn't need a framework. They needed to see what's going on.
Why teams stay stuck before the sprint even starts.
The five-day Design Sprint assumes you already know your problem. Brilliant for prototyping and testing. But if your team can't agree on what the problem is, five days won't help.
Strategy meetings go in circles. They have their place. But six months of discussion didn't give that product manager what she needed — facts. Something visible. Something testable.
Teams stay stuck because nobody gives them permission to just start. No budget approval, no full team availability, no perfect conditions. So nothing moves.
All three miss the same thing: the moment before you're ready to commit. The moment where you need to see something real before you can move forward.
What happened when we just started
It was summer. Half the team was on vacation.
We pulled together whoever was available and ran a two-day sprint.
Started on Monday. By Wednesday, we had everything:
Clarity on the one problem worth solving
A direction the CEO could validate
Facts behind the product manager's conviction
That two-day sprint became the foundation for a bigger process — two months — which created an entirely new product.
I didn't have a name for what we did that summer.
Jake Knapp, the creator of the Design Sprint, has since built a formal version of this. He calls it the Foundation Sprint.
Two days. A small team. You walk out with a Founding Hypothesis:
Your customer: who exactly are you solving for?
Your approach: what are you building and why?
Your differentiation: how is this better than what already exists?
Not a prototype. Not a slide deck. A direction you can actually test.
Key takeaways:
How to run your own two-day Foundation Sprint
1. Gather a small team: No more than five people. Include the decision-maker, one designer, and one troublemaker. Why a troublemaker? Because you need someone who will ask the hard questions that refine the problem.
2. Block two days: Monday and Tuesday. That's it. No months of planning, no five-day commitment.
3. Answer the three Founding Hypothesis questions Who is our customer? What approach are we taking? How are we different? Interview your customers, observe what they are doing and their pain points.
Use sticky notes, silent voting, and short debates to move fast.
4. Walk out with a direction, not a prototype. The goal is clarity, not perfection. You need answers you can test not answers that are already right.
Editor's take:
The hardest part for most teams is not the sprint itself. It's knowing where to start.
Is there a customer for this?
What does their current flow look like? Can we test our assumption?
So many things can be answered in two days — if you give yourself permission to start.
That’s it for this week.
If your team is stuck in that "before the sprint" moment where you sense the opportunity but can't prove it yet. I help teams go from "we think there's something here" to "now we know." In two days.
Sharmeen
P.S. The best sprint I ever facilitated was the one nobody planned.
Side note:
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