I didn’t set out to build a method
Proof Sprint wasn’t born in a brainstorm. It came from burnout.
I didn’t set out to build a method.
I just couldn’t keep working like this.
My first career crisis came sometime in 2022.
One of those quiet, creeping questions that doesn’t yell but lingers:
“Is this really it? Is this the ceiling?”
I could still think my way through that one.
But the real burnout? That came later.
In January 2024.
And that wasn’t philosophical.
It was physical.
I found myself on the floor.
Not figuratively. Not dramatically. Just… there.
My body gave out before my brain caught on.
And I still had meetings on my calendar.
I’ve always made tools
Not the big formal ones with frameworks and fanfare. Just things to help me think clearly when the work didn’t.
Glossaries to decode jargon no one admits they don’t understand.
Checklists to surface the unspoken rules.
Sketches and scribbles that helped me make sense of systems built on wishful thinking.
I didn’t call it a method.
It was more like survival.
Some people journal.
I diagram the dysfunction.
But after the burnout episode, something shifted.
I stopped fighting the culture around me.
My last gig?
I didn’t challenge the roadmap.
Didn’t argue with the process.
Didn’t try to fix what was already sliding sideways.
I didn’t have it in me anymore.
So I turned inward.
Not to retreat, but to sharpen.
To take the pieces I’d been using all along and ask:
“What’s actually essential here?”
”What would I want, if I had to start fresh?”
Proof Sprint wasn’t born in a brainstorm
It came from 15 years of patterns.
From watching the same mistakes get repeated in better tooling.
From asking, again and again:
“Why are we building this?”
“What’s the actual problem?”
“Do we have any real proof?”
Most teams couldn’t answer.
Most didn’t even pause to ask.
To be honest, I haven’t run a full “Proof Sprint” yet.
Not with the branding. Not with the banner. No t-shirt.
But I’ve run the work.
I’ve tested the tools.
I’ve applied the thinking, again and again, inside real projects, with real constraints.
And they work.
Not because they’re clever.
Because they break the trance.
They give teams permission to think again.
To name what’s true.
To say:
“We don’t have enough clarity to move forward.”
And to let that be the start of something better.
Proof Sprint is the result of all of it
Not a shiny new method, but what’s left when you strip everything else away.
Not a playbook.
Not a course.
Not a process to follow.
A correction.
A pressure test.
A refusal to keep building the wrong thing well.
I used to complain about how Agile boxed us in.
How business analysts were reduced to Jira jockeys.
How requirements got passed around like bad hand-me-downs with nobody stopping to ask where they came from.
But I’m done complaining.
This is what I’m doing instead.
Proof Sprint is my way of saying:
There is a better way.
And I’m not waiting for permission to share it.
If you’re someone who’s felt the ache.
The quiet sense that this doesn’t make sense anymore.
You’re not alone.
And you’re not wrong.
This is for you.
It’s for the part of you that’s still trying to make the work make sense.
Because I believe the work still matters.
We just need to stop pretending it makes sense when it doesn’t.
Until next time,
Pragati
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