Free playbook · For agencies & in-house design leads
The 5-Day Validation Sprint Playbook
The exact agenda, prompts, and decision artifacts I use to compress three months of pre-build research into five working days. Tested with Parliament, Admicom, and the agency partners I work with.
5 days
End-to-end sprint
3 months
Of research compressed
5 users
Tested in 24 hours
1 page
Decision artifact
Inside the playbook
What you get
The skeleton
Five days, end to end
The free playbook expands each day with the templates, scripts, and artifacts. The skeleton itself is below.
1
Day 1
Frame the bet
- Translate the business decision into one user-facing question worth testing.
- Lock the target user, the decision criteria, and the kill switch.
- Pre-write the post-sprint memo: what will we believe by Friday, and what would change our mind?
2
Day 2
Map what's known
- Two-hour expert sessions with internal stakeholders. No slides — only questions.
- Surface every assumption that, if wrong, kills the bet.
- Rank assumptions by risk × reversibility. Top three become the prototype targets.
3
Day 3
Build the smallest believable prototype
- AI-augmented production: Figma + Make + v0 + Claude Code, scoped to a single user task.
- Cut anything that doesn't directly test the top-three assumptions.
- Recruit 5 users from the actual target segment for tomorrow.
4
Day 4
Test with real humans
- 5 sessions, 45 minutes each. Same script, same prototype, different brains.
- Capture verbatim quotes against each assumption, not against the UI.
- End-of-day debrief: which assumptions held, which broke, which need a second look.
5
Day 5
Decide and hand off
- Fill in the pre-written memo with evidence.
- One-page recommendation: build, don't build, or test further.
- Hand off the prototype + recordings + memo to engineering, leadership, and (if applicable) the agency partner.
Get the playbook
I'll email it to you. No drip sequence — just the playbook.