Why I stopped pitching "sprint" the way everyone else does

I used to hate the word. Every agency deck I saw in my first year had "brand sprint" on a slide somewhere, next to a five-day calendar graphic and a promise that felt more like a magic trick than a process. Day one: discovery. Day five: logo. Clean, fast, and mostly a lie, because a real brand doesn’t get built in a week just because a client wants it to.

What I kept from the word wasn’t its reputation. It was the discipline underneath it: a defined sequence, a real timeline, and zero patience for busywork dressed up as strategy. I still call it a sprint. I just run one that respects what the word is supposed to mean, which is focused, fast, and honest, not rushed.

Here’s that sequence, in the order I actually run it, not the order that photographs best in a case study.

Discovery: the two days where I say almost nothing

Every sprint starts with me talking less than most clients expect. I ask about the business before I ask about the brand, because most founders can describe their logo problem in detail and their actual business problem in a single sentence, if that. I want the sentence first.

I sit with financials when a client will share them, sales conversations when they won’t, and the actual language customers use when they complain or when they brag. Not the language the founder wishes they used. The language they use. A founder’s read on their own customer is useful and frequently a little off, not because anyone’s being dishonest, but because nobody can hear their own brand the way a stranger scrolling past it does.

By the end of discovery I’m not chasing a creative brief. I’m chasing the gap between what a client believes about their business and what’s actually true about it. That gap is the real starting point. Almost everything that happens for the rest of the sprint is me closing it, one honest question at a time.

Market mapping: earning the direction before I defend it

This is the phase most agencies skip, or fake, and it’s the one that decides whether everything downstream is worth building.

I run a market map, the same exercise I’ve written about before: real competitors, ten to fifteen of them, plotted on axes built from the category itself, never a template dragged in from the last client. No mood boards in the room yet. Just the market, drawn honestly, including the parts that make a founder wince a little.

Read the full breakdown of how I run that exercise in the market map exercise I run before any client ever sees a logo. The short version: clustering is the finding. When most of a client’s competitors sit in the same corner of the map, playing the same safe adjectives or chasing the same three claims, that crowding tells me exactly where the noise is loudest and exactly where a client can’t win by joining it.

Positioning: the decision everything else depends on

Positioning gets decided here, as a business decision, not a creative preference. That distinction matters more than most clients assume walking in.

Interbrand’s 2025 Best Global Brands report found that a one percent rise in its Role of Brand Index, essentially a measure of how much a brand actually drives a customer’s choice, correlates with a 2.3 percent increase in share price (Branding Journal). Positioning isn’t the warmup before the real work starts. Positioning is the real work. Everything visual that comes after it either earns that position or it doesn’t, and no amount of craft in the identity phase fixes a position nobody can defend.

I test every proposed position against three questions before it leaves the room. Can the client prove it, not just claim it. Does it hold up against a direct comparison with the two or three sharpest competitors on the map. Does it match how the client actually behaves when nobody’s watching, not just how they want to be seen. If a position fails any of those, I don’t carry it forward, no matter how good it sounds in the meeting.

Identity exploration: three real directions, not one safe one and two throwaways

Once positioning is set, I move into identity exploration, and this is where I’ve watched the most agencies quietly betray their own client.

The honest version of this phase means building real directions, plural, each one a legitimate answer to the positioning just earned. The dishonest version, the one I sat through more than once earlier in my career, means one direction the agency actually wants and two sacrificial ones built weak on purpose, so the client picks the "right" answer without ever knowing they were steered there.

I don’t run it that way. Every direction I bring into a review has to survive standing on its own. If a client picked the "wrong" one, I’d still want it to work, because that means I did the actual job instead of performing a choice that was decided before the meeting started.

Where most agencies actually get it wrong

Here’s the part I’ll say plainly, because it’s the reason this piece exists. Most agencies don’t fail at brand sprints because they lack talent. They fail because the process stops being strategic work and starts being a deliverable factory: a fixed template stamped onto every account regardless of fit, with client input treated as a formality to survive on the way to the invoice.

That’s not just my opinion, invented for a blog post. WARC’s Future of Strategy 2025 report surveyed strategists across the industry this year, and the picture it found was a discipline losing its own nerve.

“We’ve become risk averse, and our clients have become risk averse. We are hiding behind mountains of data and research, and we’re not coming out strongly enough with our point of view.”

Ellie Bamford, Chief Strategy Officer, VML North America, quoted in "Agencies Sideline Strategy Even as Client Demand Spikes in Volatile Environment," BestMediaInfo, 2025

That’s the templated sprint in one sentence. Data used as a hiding place instead of a starting point. A process built to survive a client meeting instead of one built to earn a real answer. When a shop runs the identical five-day format on every account, regardless of category, competitor set, or what a client’s actual customers are saying, that shop has stopped doing strategy. It’s running a script and calling it one.

Refinement: where a client’s real voice does the work

Refinement is where a client’s voice either shapes the direction or gets managed around it, and the difference shows up fast. I build structured feedback rounds specifically so a client can push back on the actual thinking, not just the font choices, and I treat that pushback as information, not an obstacle to talk someone out of.

This is also where a lot of agencies quietly defend a direction instead of improving it, because changing course after the reveal feels like losing. I don’t hold that posture. If a client’s pushback is right, the work gets better and nobody’s ego is the casualty. If it’s not right, I say so, plainly, and explain why, because I don’t dictate, I educate.

Delivery: a system, not a stack of files

Delivery, when I get there, isn’t a folder of logo files and a thank-you email. It’s a system built to hold up in someone else’s hands: guidelines with enough judgment baked into them that a junior designer three years from now can make a decision the brand would actually stand behind, not just a set of rules to copy without understanding why they exist.

“A sprint that ends at the file drop was never finished. It ends when the brand can survive a decision I didn’t personally make in the room.”

David Keyes

That’s the actual finish line. Not the reveal. The moment a client can run with it without me standing over their shoulder.

If your last brand sprint felt like a countdown instead of a conversation, that wasn’t a sprint. That was a template with your name on it.

If this is the problem you’re facing, let’s talk.