Free Miro Template for Foundation Sprints

The foundation sprint is a powerful two-day process that helps founders and product teams clarify their product strategy before building anything. Developed by Jake Knapp and John Zorotsky after working with hundreds of teams at Google Ventures and Character Capital, this framework emerged from observing what separated successful products from failures.

The process addresses a common failure mode they observed: teams jumping straight into building without clarifying fundamentals. As John explains, "After these hundreds of teams that we've worked with, we've seen that there's one failure mode which is they don't know what that set of basics are, then there's this other failure mode where they never test."

The foundation sprint solves this by bringing the core team together for about 10 hours (typically spread across two days) to work through three key phases:

1. Basics: Defining your customer, problem, competition, and advantages
2. Differentiation: Identifying how you'll stand out from alternatives
3. Approach: Selecting the implementation path to test first

What makes this process particularly valuable is how it forces teams to slow down before accelerating. As John notes, "One phenomenon we've seen when teams are building things really quickly with AI is that the more AI-generated or assisted they are, the more generic they tend to turn out." The foundation sprint counteracts this by creating space for deep thinking about differentiation.

The output is a clear founding hypothesis that the entire team is aligned on, which can then be tested through design sprints. Teams who've gone through this process report compressing 3-4 months of work into 3-4 weeks.

For teams wanting to try this themselves, John and Jake have made their Miro template freely available at character.vc. This is the exact template they use when working with founders in their accelerator program. The template guides teams through each step of the process, from identifying basics to crafting differentiation to selecting an approach.

The ROI on these two days can be enormous. Instead of spending months building something that might not resonate with customers, teams can quickly align on a clear hypothesis and then test it systematically. As John puts it, "Put yourself in a situation where you can slow down and do some hard thinking, some deep thinking about what's actually gonna make your product unique. Going fast can actually slow you down in the long run."