At this point, your walls should be plastered with sketches of potential solutions. But Wednesday is the day to separate the wheat from the chaff. After all, you can’t see all your ideas through.
You should begin the day by sorting through solutions. To avoid wasting time and energy on never-ending discussions, simply present solutions, answer questions and then vote on an idea.
When it comes to making these kinds of decisions, discussion isn’t helpful. For instance, people might be easily influenced by someone just because he’s more charismatic or higher up on a hierarchy, even if his ideas are less developed than others.
To avoid this, sprints offer an alternative strategy.
For every sketch pinned to the wall, the facilitator has three minutes to present the concept. Then, when his time is up, the creator of the idea answers questions. Once all the sketches are reviewed, a simple vote is taken to choose the best ones.
But you shouldn’t jump right into prototyping after choosing your idea. Instead, start storyboarding the winning solution’s development. So, while your winning solution is still pinned to the wall, you should add additional information and expand the story into ten or 15 panels surrounding the original sketch, detailing how the solution will be developed.
Just take the team behind Slack, a hugely successful app for team communication, that built its ingenious product by literally drawing every step of its implementation. For instance, the company even sketched out the final steps where customers would read about their product in the news, go to their website and, ultimately, register for the app.