Design Sprint Test and Score (Friday)

Design Sprint Test and Score (Friday)

Friday is the sprint's payoff. 5 target-profile customers run the prototype while the team observes; the team synthesizes observations into a scorecard against the sprint questions; the Decider makes the build / iterate / pivot / stop call by end-of-day. The week's 35-40 person-days plus customer recruiting cost converts into one actionable decision.

Family contract: docs/reference/skill-families/design-sprint-skills-contract.md. This skill is a member of design-sprint-skills.

When to Use

• It is Day 5 of the Design Sprint and Thursday's prototype passed trial run.
• 5 confirmed participants are scheduled (canonical; or 4 if 1 cancelled-and-no-buffer; pause if below 4).
• The team can observe interviews live (in-person or via Zoom breakout room) and synthesize during the day.
• The Decider is present Friday PM for the post-interview review (canonically 14:00-18:00 PT window covering observation of slots 4-5 plus Decider review by 17:30 PT).

When NOT to Use

• Thursday prototype did not pass trial run. Re-run trial; if still failing at 19:00 PT Thursday, postpone Friday.
• Fewer than 3 customers confirmed. Per Ratified Decision 3, the canonical guidance is 5 customers; 3-4 or 6-7 gets a documented warning; below 3 or above 7 should trigger a re-decision (postpone or split testing). Note: the v0.1.0 family validator does NOT mechanically enforce these thresholds (cohort count is in the EXAMPLE artifact, not in frontmatter); enforcement is a v2.16 validator-expansion candidate.
• Decider unavailable for the post-interview review window. Without Decider, the day produces observations without a call.
• The team plans to use this skill to write the executive memo. Per Ratified Decision 4: exec memo authoring is delegated to foundation-stakeholder-update (existing pm-skills foundation skill); this skill produces the Decider summary only.

What This Skill Produces

A single bundled artifact with six sections:

1. Per-customer interview observation notes: one section per customer; covers Context (Act 2) reactions, Tasks (Act 4) behavior with timestamps, Debrief (Act 5) reactions including pricing. Captured live during the day's interviews.
2. Best quotes: 5-15 verbatim customer quotes the team flags as most signal-bearing. Used in the Decider summary and in any downstream pitch or planning artifact.
3. Scorecard grid: rows are the sprint questions (from Monday); columns are the 5 customers; each cell is Y / N / partial / unclear with a one-line note; rightmost column is the team's day-end decision per question (Validated / Invalidated / Inconclusive).
4. Observed patterns: 4 buckets (worked, hesitated, broke trust, unexpected) with 2-4 patterns per bucket. Each pattern names how many customers showed it.
5. Hot takes: one short paragraph per team member capturing their personal read on Friday before group synthesis biases the read. Written silently in parallel.
6. Decider summary: the Decider's call (build / iterate / pivot / stop / reframe) plus the highest-confidence learning, the most important revision the team would make to the prototype direction, and the next artifact the team will produce (the post-sprint deliverable).

See references/TEMPLATE.md for the canonical structure and references/EXAMPLE.md for the Brainshelf book-catalog Friday artifact.

Friday Time Structure

Friday is the longest day: customer interviews start early (canonically 09:00 PT) and the Decider review concludes the day (canonically 17:30 PT).

• 09:00-16:30: 5 customer interviews of 50-60 minutes each at 09:00 / 10:30 / 12:00 / 14:00 / 15:30. Each slot: 10 min setup + 50-55 min interview + 5 min team huddle to capture observations before next customer.