The Sprint Zero
Everything Starts With An Idea.
Before a line of code is written, before the first user story is written, before the first ticket is placed, there’s the most important part of the process — The Sprint Zero.
Part of what makes Tanooki Labs unique is that we focus on a stage of product development rather than a specific industry vertical. Sprint Zero is how we meld your sector expertise with our product expertise.
Through a series of in-depth product meetings we help you to fully define of what your product is, how a user moves through it and (most importantly) what it looks like. We follow a modified version of our process with a Product meeting followed by a Demo/Feedback meeting. These meetings happen twice a week for anywhere from 2–5 weeks with the Tanooki Design and Product teams.
At the end of Sprint Zero we all gather around a clickable Prototype of your product (generally produced in InVision or Sketch) that is used to define development and inform investors/stakeholders.
Many of the product decisions that would otherwise get discovered in the course of development have been made already. Designs are not finalized, but they’re mostly complete and in almost all cases enough of the underlying design decisions have been made so that development can make highly educated assumptions about how a feature should look and behave. This helps development move quicker, and in the end more cost effectively.
All of this means that development runs more efficiently, products get done quicker, and there’s generally less change in scope from the product estimate and the final MVP/V1. That means your product is set up to succeed.
Interested in taking part in a Tanooki Sprint Zero? Or want to learn more about the development process here at Tanooki?
