Working with Stanix

Weekly Experience at Stanix Games

Every week, when possible, our team goes through a sprint, which often more than not is half or a quarter of a major epic, which is a collection of several tasks.

The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. This five-day concept was taken from Google Ventures, and critiqued to fit with our teams culture and work style.

Working together in a sprint, you can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype. The sprint also gives us a superpower: We can fast-forward into the future to see our finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.

Because we're such a small team this is very important. We can't afford to spend an unfeasible amount of time working on low impact features.

What A Sprint Is Like?

Technically it is six days instead of five days. The reason for this is that every Sunday, the team gets together and decides on a specific direction to focus on for the next five days.

Then, on Monday, we map out the problem and pick an important place to focus.

On Tuesday, we sketch competing solutions on paper.

On Wednesday, we make difficult decisions and turn our ideas into a testable hypothesis.

On Thursday, we hammer out a high-fidelity prototype.

And on Friday, we test it with real live humans through our weekly game update.