Before the day · Page 15
The sponsor
For you only
The sponsor is the most senior person you can get for the last hour: the CEO, the CPO, the head of product. The person who can say yes. Without them, the day produces four prototypes and a warm feeling. With them, it produces a decision. This page is how you get them and what you do with them.
Why the last hour works. They watch the pitches, they see what real users did, and they decide in the room. No follow-up alignment meeting. No deck sent around for three weeks. The people who needed to say yes were there, and they said it.
The ask, in their language. Senior people say no to workshops and yes to decisions. So offer the decision. There is a useful frame for this from Jeff Bezos's 2015 shareholder letter: some decisions are one-way doors, consequential and nearly irreversible, and deserve slow care. But most are two-way doors, changeable and reversible, and should be made quickly by small groups. A build day decision is a two-way door with the handle already turned: the go is "keep testing for two weeks", the no-go costs nothing because the prototype cost a day. Say that. You are not asking them to bet the company in an afternoon, you are asking them to make a reversible call with better evidence than they usually get.
Say something like
"I need one hour on Thursday, four to five. Four teams will show you working prototypes that real users tried that afternoon. Your job is to pick: go, iterate, or kill. Whatever you pick, it is written on one page and owned by someone before you leave the room."
Brief them before the day, fifteen minutes. What the challenge is and why it matters now. What they will see (rough working prototypes, not polished products, on purpose). What the rubric scores and why polish is not on it. What you need from them: questions during Q&A, a call at the end, and a named owner and date for whatever they pick. Appendix B has this briefing as a one-page note you can send instead.
One warning. If the sponsor cannot name the decision they are coming to make, the challenge is wrong, not the sponsor. Hand them a toy question and you get a toy decision.