Most brand sprints fail.

Not because the team running them is incompetent. Because they try to do too much in too little time. A real brand identity takes six to twelve weeks. A "sprint" that tries to compress that into five days is going to ship something half-baked — which the client then has to live with for the next decade.

But we still run sprints. Just not for identity work. We run sprints for one thing: deciding what a brand is for.

Here's how we structure them.

Week 1: Listening:

We meet the founding team. Not the marketing team. Not the agency that hired us. The founders, or the leadership group that holds the vision. We ask them what they're trying to build, why they started, who they're trying to reach, and what failure would look like. We listen more than we talk. We record everything.

Week 2: Mapping:

We map what we heard. Themes, contradictions, unspoken priorities. We surface the things the team said but didn't realize they meant. We share this mapping with the team on the morning of Day 3.

Week 3: Confrontation:

This is the hardest day. We tell the team what we heard, and where it doesn't add up. Most brands have internal contradictions — they say they want to be premium but they price for the mid-market; they say they're for everyone but they only design for one demographic. We name those contradictions in the room.

Week 4: Decision:

The team makes choices. Real choices, with trade-offs attached. By the end of Day 4, the brand has a one-line statement of who it's for, what it does, and what it's not.

Week 5: Documentation:

We write it down. The statement, the trade-offs, the things the team agreed to do and not do. This document becomes the brief for the identity work that follows.

A brand sprint doesn't produce a logo. It produces a decision. The logo comes in week eight.

Sprints fail when they try to produce both. Sprints work when they stay focused on the decision, and let the rest of the work breathe.