Work Alone Together Method Speeds Decision-Making

The Foundation Sprint is a structured 10-hour process (typically spread over two days) that helps product teams and founders clarify their product strategy before building anything. Developed by Jake Knapp and John Zorotsky after working with hundreds of teams, it emerged from seeing that many teams skip crucial foundational work.

Core Principles of the Foundation Sprint

• Work alone together: Team members silently write their own answers to key questions, then vote, with a designated "decider" making final choices
• Clarity before code: Spending 10 hours on strategy can save months of building the wrong thing
• Differentiation is essential: Products need a clear, compelling promise that separates them from alternatives
• Test before building: Follow the Foundation Sprint with Design Sprints to validate your hypothesis with real customers

The Three Phases of a Foundation Sprint

1. Basics (First ~4 hours)

• Define your target customer with specificity
• Clarify the problem you're solving for them
• Identify competition and alternatives (including workarounds)
• Document your advantages (capabilities, insights, motivation)

2. Differentiation (Middle ~3 hours)

• Start with "classic differentiators" (fast/slow, easy/hard, smart/dumb, etc.)
• Create custom differentiators specific to your product and market
• Score your product against competitors on these dimensions
• Create a "business school 101" two-by-two diagram showing how you win
• Develop project principles that guide decision-making aligned with differentiation

3. Approach (Final ~3 hours)

• Identify multiple possible implementation paths
• Evaluate each approach through "magic lenses":
  • Customer lens: Which approach best solves the customer problem?
  • Pragmatic lens: Which approach is fastest/cheapest to build?
  • Growth lens: Which approach reaches customers fastest?
  • Financial lens: Which approach creates most long-term value?
  • Differentiation lens: Which approach best delivers on your differentiators?
  • Conviction lens: Which approach are you most excited to build?
• Choose a primary approach and backup plan

The Output: Your Founding Hypothesis

• A single sentence that captures your strategy:
  • "If we solve [PROBLEM] for [CUSTOMER] with [APPROACH], we believe they'll choose it over [COMPETITORS] because of [DIFFERENTIATOR 1] and [DIFFERENTIATOR 2]."
• This hypothesis becomes the foundation for Design Sprints where you build and test prototypes

Why This Process Works

• Alignment: Forces team members to make implicit assumptions explicit
• Focus: Prevents building generic, undifferentiated products
• Speed: Accelerates 3-4 months of work into 3-4 weeks
• Clarity: Creates a decision-making framework for the entire team
• Customer-centricity: Keeps focus on what matters to customers, not just technology
• Validation: Provides structure to test and refine your hypothesis

Common Failure Modes This Prevents

• Teams having different definitions of their target customer
• Building something nobody wants because you didn't test
• Creating generic, AI-generated products with no differentiation
• Getting locked into the first solution you prototype
• Spending months building the wrong thing