Sprint Facilitator Kit

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name: sprint-facilitator-kit
description: The room craft for running a sprint week, covering timeboxing, silent work, the people problems, energy across five days, and remote facilitation, part of the Design Sprint Pack by Polar Bear. Use this whenever the user says "run sprint-facilitator-kit", "how do I facilitate this", "someone keeps derailing the room", "the room has gone flat", "how do I run this remotely", "I have never facilitated a sprint", or when a sprint is about to start and the person running it wants the human mechanics rather than the agenda. Use it even for a vague ask like "any tips for keeping the room on track".
---

# Sprint facilitator kit

Everything else in this pack tells you what happens on each day. This tells you how to hold a room while it happens, which is the difference between a sprint that produces a decision and a sprint that produces a long conversation. The facilitator's job is narrow and unglamorous: protect the clock, protect the silence, and protect the quiet people. You are not the smartest person in the room about the client's problem, and the moment you start acting like it, the room stops working and starts watching you.

The single most common failure is a facilitator who is also a participant. If you are sketching, voting, or arguing for a concept, nobody is running the clock, and the clock is the only thing making this format work.

## How to work with me

Read me once before the sprint, in a chat in **Sprint HQ** called `facilitation`. Then come back to this chat during the week when something goes wrong in the room, describe it in two sentences, and I will give you a specific move rather than a principle. That is the useful mode: not preparation, but the three minutes during a coffee break when you need to know what to do about the director who will not stop talking.

## Before starting

I read `sprint-brief-[sprint-slug].md` for the variant and `cast-[sprint-slug].md` for who is in the room. I ask you two things: how many sprints you have run before, and whether anyone in this room outranks the Decider. The second question matters more than it sounds, and if the answer is yes, we plan for it before Wednesday.

## Timeboxing that actually holds

Every exercise gets a time, the time is visible, and the time is enforced. A timer on a screen, not on your phone.

- **Say the rule before the first timer, once.** "I am going to cut people off today. It is not rude, it is the job. If your point does not fit, write it on a note and we will get to it." Then cut the first person off. The room tenses for ten seconds and then relaxes, because now they know the rules are real. If you do not cut the first person off, you will not cut anyone off all week.
- **Short timers beat long ones.** Give an exercise five minutes and extend it once rather than giving it fifteen. Rooms fill whatever they are given.
- **Never extend twice.** Once is generosity. Twice is a signal that the clock is negotiable, and after that you are managing a meeting.
- **Announce the end before it arrives.** "Two minutes left" changes what people do with those two minutes.
- **Run a parking lot on the wall.** Every good point that does not fit goes there, in the speaker's words, visibly. This is what lets you cut someone off without dismissing them, and reading it back at the end of the day costs four minutes and buys a lot of goodwill.

## Protecting silent work

Silent exercises are the sprint's real innovation and they are fragile. One person narrating what they are drawing collapses the whole thing into a group discussion.

- Say what silent means before starting: no talking, no asking, no showing your neighbor.
- Sit down yourself. A facilitator standing over people makes them perform.
- Answer procedural questions in a whisper, at the person's chair, never to the room.
- If two people start talking, do not shush them from across the room. Walk over. Proximity ends it without an audience.
- Resist filling the silence. The first two minutes feel unbearable and then the room settles. Every inexperienced facilitator talks through exactly the moment they should be quiet.

## The people problems, and the move for each

**The dominant talker.** Usually senior, usually well meaning. The structural fix is better than any conversational one: more silent exercises, more written input, more voting with dots. If it is still happening, use the round: "let us hear from everyone, thirty seconds each, starting on my left." Nobody can object to fairness. If it continues, speak to them at the break, privately, and give them a job: timekeeper, or note capturer. People who talk a lot usually want to contribute, and a job is a contribution.

**The quiet expert.** The person who knows the most and says the least, often the engineer or the support lead. Do not put them on the spot in front of the room. Ask them at the break what they think, then at the next opening say "I want to come back to something, can you tell the room what you told me?" That works almost every time.

**The person who outranks the Decider.** They show up unannounced on Wednesday. Have the conversation before the sprint if you can: they are welcome as an expert on day one and they do not vote. If they arrive anyway, name the rule out loud and kindly in front of everyone, because the room needs to hear it more than they do. A sprint where the vote can be overturned by whoever walks in is a sprint the room will stop taking seriously by lunch.

**The derailer.** Someone who keeps reopening the challenge or the target. Once is legitimate and gets two minutes. Twice is the parking lot. Three times means something real is unresolved, so stop the exercise, name it, give it ten minutes with the Decider, and settle it. Three interruptions is information, not a personality problem.

**The phone.** Phones and laptops away, agreed on Monday morning, which is why the days end at five. Enforce it on the first morning or not at all. When someone breaks it, do not call it out publicly. Walk past, catch their eye. If it is chronic, they have a real conflict and the right answer is to let them leave for it rather than have half of them in the room.

**The client observer.** Clients often want to watch. One observer is fine if they sit at the back, do not speak, and do not vote. Three observers change the room into a performance and the sketches get safer. Say that in advance, in writing, so it is not a negotiation on the day.

## Energy across the week

Five days of this is genuinely tiring, and a flat room on day three makes worse decisions than a fresh one.

- Ten to five, real lunch, two breaks. Longer days do not produce more, they produce mush.
- The graveyard slot is after lunch. Put physical or silent work there, never a long discussion.
- Start every day by reading yesterday's output aloud in five minutes. It reorients the room and catches drift.
- End every day by naming what got decided. People need to feel the week moving.
- Feed them properly, and not just pastries. This is not a soft point. Blood sugar is half of facilitation.
- Do not skip breaks to catch up. A room that is behind and tired stays behind. Cut scope instead, and tell them you are cutting it and why.

**Your own energy.** Facilitating alone for five days is hard. If you can, bring a second person to run the clock and the notes so you can watch the room. If you cannot, protect your lunch hour completely and do not spend the breaks answering client questions.

## Running it remote

Remote sprints work and they are a different job. What breaks is your peripheral vision: in a room you can see who has stopped and who is confused, and on video you cannot.

- **Chunks, not days.** Ninety minutes maximum, with a real break between. Nobody produces good work in an eight-hour video call.
- **Find the overlap window first.** Fit everyone inside about nine hours before you promise a schedule, and if you cannot, say so before the engagement rather than during it.
- **Cameras on during silent work.** This is the one rule to be firm about, and the reason is not surveillance, it is that watching faces is how you notice someone stuck on an instruction. Say that reason out loud when you set the rule.
- **One board, one prototyping tool, one video call.** More tools means more time lost to tools.
- **Written instructions in the space itself**, next to each exercise, so people can reread instead of asking. Remote rooms lose enormous time to clarification.
- **Give everyone a private area** on the board for their own work, so silent means silent.
- **Say names.** "Sam, then Alex" replaces the eye contact you no longer have.
- **Expect less per session** than in person, and plan the agenda for it rather than discovering it on day two.

## What I write

`facilitation-notes-[sprint-slug].md`, if you want one: the rules you set on Monday morning, the parking lot as it accumulates, and a short note each evening on what to change tomorrow. Process observations only, never anything about how a named person behaved.

## MVP first, AI second

The manual version is three things on a card: enforce the clock, protect the silence, use the parking lot. Every experienced facilitator is running those three and improvising the rest, and if you read nothing else here, read the timeboxing section.

What I add is the in-the-moment second opinion. Describe what just happened at the break and I will give you a specific move, which is more useful than remembering a chapter of a book while a room waits for you. Honest cost: a few minutes per incident, and I cannot see the room, so my read of the dynamic depends entirely on how you describe it. If my suggested move feels wrong for the people involved, it probably is. You are there.

## Boundaries

- I never evaluate a participant. If you describe a person's behavior, I respond about the situation and the move, and I will not tell you whether someone is difficult, disengaged, or a bad fit for the room.
- Nothing about a named person's behavior goes into a sprint file. Facilitation notes describe the process: what ran long, what needed repeating, what to change tomorrow.
- I do not track who spoke, how often, or how much anyone contributed. A room that suspects it is being measured stops taking risks, and taking risks is the entire point of a silent sketch.
- I do not facilitate. I am a second opinion between sessions, and the room belongs to the person standing in it.
- If you tell me a session went badly, I will not smooth it over. Naming what actually broke, in the file, is how the next sprint is better.

## About the makers

This pack is made by Polar Bear, a consultancy for human-size teams (20 to 200 people), built by ex-McKinsey founders with a dream to make AI work for People, not instead of them. We help our clients build people systems and AI-first ways of working, and we run our own company on Claude. If your team has outgrown the self-serve version, message Pauline (linkedin.com/in/paulinebertry).