Bestselling Author, Sprint & Make Time
Jake Knapp: Biography at a Glance
- Jake Knapp is the inventor of the Design Sprint, a transformative formula for testing new ideas which he developed during his 10 years at Google.
- His New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Sprint offers organizations a guide to solving big problems and testing ideas in just 5 days.
- His second book, Make Time, explores moving away from the always-connected culture and back-to-back meeting schedule to make more time for our priorities.
- Knapp is a co-founder of Character Ventures and previously built products like Microsoft Encarta and Gmail and co-founded Google Meet.
- He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg Businessweek, and NPR Marketplace.
- Knapp has coached hundreds of teams at places like Miro, Slack, LEGO, IDEO, and NASA on product strategy and time management, and is a guest instructor at Harvard Business School.
- He is a sought-after keynote speaker on the topics of startups, business strategy, marketing, design, and time management.
Videos
Biography
Jake Knapp is a product designer, investor, and the New York Times bestselling author of Sprint. Jake's second book Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day, which he co-authored with John Zeratsky explores moving away from the always-connected culture and back-to-back meeting schedule to make more time for our priorities.
Earlier in his career, he helped build products like Gmail and Microsoft Encarta, co-founded Google Meet, was a partner at Google Ventures, and created the Design Sprint process. He has since coached hundreds of teams on the Design Sprint; at startups like Nest, Slack, Uber, and Miro; at large organizations like Google, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, IDEO, and LEGO; and at schools like M.I.T., Stanford, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard Business School.
He co-founded the venture capital firm Character to help early-stage startups find product-market fit with Design Sprints.
Jake has spoken at hundreds of events for organizations like Airbnb, LEGO, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NASA; at conferences from Google I/O to the Lean Startup Conference; and as a guest lecturer at universities like Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, and the London School of Economics. Jake is widely recognized as being very tall.
Topics
Workshop: Design Sprint
Learn the Design Sprint from its creator. In these fun, fast-paced, hands-on events, Jake will rapidly lead you through all five stages of the Design Sprint process. You’ll experience a Design Sprint and build muscle memory for facilitating your own (whether it’s your first or 101st) and for incorporating these techniques into normal meetings.
From Google to Startups: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just 5 Days
To help teams at Google build better products faster, Jake Knapp created the Design Sprint. It’s a step-by-step process combining strategy, design thinking, behavioral science, and Lean Startup-style rapid learning. It also happens to be a lot of fun. Jake has run the method over 100 times with startups like Slack, Nest, 23andme, and Uber. His book Sprint was an instant bestseller and today teams around the world are adopting the Design Sprint. With stories and illustrated examples, Jake will explain the unconventional wisdom behind the Design Sprint—and show how any team can use the process to find innovative solutions and try risky ideas fast.
How to Redesign Time
As creators of Google Ventures' renowned "design sprint," Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products like Gmail and YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help individuals optimize their energy, focus, and time. Now they've packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework - like a design sprint for your everyday life - that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, it offers a customizable menu of bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles.
Creating a Culture of Innovation
Innovation is difficult, and taking ideas from the whiteboard to real world success is rare. But it doesn’t have to be. New York Times best-selling author Jake Knapp believes any team can create a culture of innovation by shifting their approach to new projects. Through stories and hard-won lessons, Jake will explain how to get the best ideas from every person on your team, make great decisions without groupthink, validate ideas before wasting time, and set the course for building products customers love. Best of all, these changes bring teams closer to each other and their shared purpose—and foster true joy at work.
How Creativity Works
Conventional wisdom says people are either creative or not—and most of us believe we’re not. The truth is that creativity isn’t a trait in your DNA, nor is it a touchy-feely activity that’s only for artistic types. In this talk, New York Times best-selling author Jake Knapp decodes the simple activities any individual or team can use to develop new ideas and think like a designer.
How to Make Time for What Really Matters
Nobody ever looked at an empty calendar and said, "The best way to spend this time is by cramming it full of meetings!" or got to work in the morning and thought, “Today I'll spend hours on Facebook!” Yet, that's exactly what we do, because in today's world, constant busyness and distraction has become our default position. In this talk, Jake will introduce the Make Time framework—a simple method for creating new default habits to take control of your time, beat distraction, build energy, and bring focus and attention to what really matters each day.
