Considering a Design Sprint training?
Here are your options worldwide

Are you thinking about taking a course to learn more about Design Sprints? After a quick search, you might have discovered that there is a whole world out there. Over the past years, Design Sprints gained enormous popularity. Subsequently, more and more training institutes and organizations, that teach you how to use the method, pop up.
To ease the process of decision making, we compiled a list of Design Sprint trainers worldwide. We also listed a variety of decision criteria; course characteristics that might be important for you to get most Return On Investment.
First a bit of background. What are Design Sprints?
The Design Sprint is a time-constrained, five-phase process that reduces the risks of bringing a new product, feature or service to the market. It gathers feedback from customers on new solutions, before the product is built. The method also demonstrates to stir up creativity in a team and helps to make critical decisions, faster.
The Design Sprint has been developed and popularised by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz, who together published the book ‘Sprint- How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days’ (2016). Designer Jake Knapp created the five-day process at Google. The methodology has been adopted by many Google Ventures and highly successful startups such as Uber, Blue Bottle Coffee, Slack, and Shopify.
The rise of Design Sprints
It is a long time now that Design Sprints were used only by young, tech startups. The acclaimed success of the framework also triggered the interest of professionals in established companies, who search for tools to bring innovation into their companies. Whereas many successful startups adopted the Design Sprints from the start, established companies need to make a switch in working processes and habits, to implement and benefit from the framework. Setting the prerequisites and further implementation, therefore, became another focus area for some trainers and consultants. Trainers now target a variety of professionals, from startup founders to designers, from UX leads to developers, from marketers to innovation managers in multinationals. Most of the trainers combine public workshops with in-house training and facilitation.
Who are those Design Sprint training providers?
Design Sprint trainers roughly come from two different backgrounds.
- Some started as a product design or UX agency, who adopted the Design Sprint themselves in order to improve user experiences. By adopting the framework, the newly build digital products were not only embraced by their clients but even more so by its end-users. After implementing Design Sprint in their own agencies, they started training their clients, as well as outsiders. In this category, we find Design Sprint Academy (Germany, UK, Canada, Australia) AJ&Smart (Germany), Perspective (The Netherlands) and Hike One (The Netherlands).
- Other trainers are experienced consultants and trainers in the area of UX, Scrum, Agile and Lean, who stay market-oriented by adding Design Sprints to their curriculum. For example, the German Trendig offers Design Sprint courses next to certified Agile and software training. The UXER school (Spain) offers Design Sprint workshops next to other user-centered and Design Thinking courses, just as UX-republic (France). The trainers behind Lǿpe (Norway) are experienced workshop facilitators and then decided to focus on Design Sprints only.
Here’s a sneak peek into a list of worldwide Design Sprint traning providers, listing prices, curriculum, and key learnings. Find more in this link.

HOW TO MAKE A DECISION?
The list and criteria below are by no means complete but should serve as a guide to make a better (and better informed) decision. It should give you a sense of direction what to look for and enables you to weigh each criterion to what you find most important.
Criteria 1: Your learning goals and level
To identify the level of your desired course, you might want to define your learning objectives:
- To gain the right knowledge and correct understanding of the Design Sprint framework
- To gain hands-on experience with the Design Sprint phases and skills to run a Sprint
- To gain or upgrade your existing facilitation skills and conduct the process yourself.
Based on your learning objectives, we classified the following three levels:
- Beginner
- Intermediate
- Advanced
We advise you to select beginner courses when you never had any first-hand experience with Design sprints. Perhaps you read the book ‘Sprint’ (Jake Knapp et al.) or did some internet research and you want to learn the basics and make sense of all the buzzwords.
We would advise intermediate courses for those who want to experience the process so that you have a full, hands-on understanding of the entire framework.
Last, advanced workshops are for those who already facilitated one or two Design Sprints, but would like to improve their Facilitation skills. This level is also suitable for Agile Coaches, Team Leads, Innovation Leads and Managers who want to want to add Design Sprints to their toolbox.
Criteria 2: Gained skills & acquired knowledge
When selecting a course consider the type of knowledge and skills that you want to walk away with. Here’s the type of knowledge and skills you can expect to acquire during a Design Sprint course:
- What is a Design Sprint?
- When should we run a Design Sprint?
- What is human-centric in a Design Sprint?
- How to create an empathy map?
- How to use empathy in a Design Sprint?
- Types of Design Sprints
- What are the benefits of a Design Sprint?
- How to prepare for a Design Sprint?
- Design Sprint pitfalls
- What are the Long-term goals?
- What are Sprint Questions and how to define them?
- What is the User Journey?
- How to create a customer journey map?
- What are the HMW and how to use them?
- What are Lightning Demos?
- How does sketching work?
- How to sketch 3-panel solutions?
- How to build a storyboard?
- How to build a prototype?
- How to test a solution?
- How to run a user interview?
- How to synthesize test data?
- How to prepare for the next Design Sprint?
- How to get stakeholder buy-in?
- How to engage the team in the process ͣ
- How to manage a lack of engagement ͣ
- How to manage conflicts ͣ
- How to manage deviations ͣ
- How to manage the energy levels in the room ͣ
- Deep understanding of the Design Sprint phases ͣ
- Personality types in the team, profiling ͣ
- Managing (difficult) group dynamics ͣ
- How to give the right instructions ͣ
- How to onboard and engage the team ͣ
ͣ : Skills and knowledge you typically gain during advanced (facilitation) courses.
You can find the skills & knowledge for each training in this Link.
Criteria 3: Expertise
Another important criterion is the expertise of the trainers, both into the subject as well as in training and facilitating teams and individuals. As mentioned before, some providers have build experience by applying the framework themselves, while building digital products. Others have a background as trainers (for example in Agile, Scrum or Design Thinking) and added Design Sprint training to their curriculum.
When known, we specified the number of Design Sprints that trainers facilitated themselves. You can find this data in this Google Drive sheet
Criteria 4: Costs
In the table below, you find the costs and days for each of the courses. For a 1-day course expect to pay between €400 and €800, for 2-days between €1000 and €2000, with some exceptions on the higher end (e.g. Jake Knapp: €4000).
You might ask yourself: are Design Sprints expensive? We made a very rough comparison with other courses in the same field. We found similar or more expensive examples for UX, UI and Design Thinking courses in Europe. For example:
- 2-day UX training in Berlin: € 945 (UXtraining)
- 3-day course UX/UI in Berlin: €3775 (Knowledge Academy)
- 5-day UX course in London: €3336 (XDi)
- 2-day Design Thinking course in Amsterdam: €1595 ((Design Thinkers Academy)
- 5-days Design Thinking training Paris: €3390 (Frenchfutureacademy).
We would advise thinking about your needs, desired level and learnings first, and then compare the prices of providers that offer your desired ‘package’.
Other criteria to consider….
Reputation
Consider the trainer’s client portfolio, references, and testimonials. Visit their website, and look for ratings on Facebook and Google. Consider the knowledge they share via social channels. Also, visit the trainers’ Linkedin profiles, and look for their experiences and contacts.
Group size
With a large group of people, it might be harder to realize your personal development goals. Therefore, inform about the maximum number of participants per trainer.
Provided tools and materials
While not always mentioned, ask trainers what you can take home after the course. Will you be able to receive the presentation and training materials? Are you welcome to ask questions after the course? Will you become part of alumni, where you can meet other Design Sprint enthusiasts and learn from each other?
Refunding options
When you buy your ticket via a third party such as Eventbrite, you can find the ticket policy fairly easily. Otherwise, ask the trainers whether you get a (last-minute) refund or are able to join the next course, in case you can’t attend. Some organizations also guarantee a money-back principle when you’re not happy with the results.
In this Google sheet you can find additional details on each Design Sprint training provider, as well as the learnings you can expect to acquire.
NOTES & DISCLAIMER
- This research only includes those organizations providing public Design Sprint workshops on a regular basis, and have several courses scheduled in the next few months (Sept.- Dec. 2018). Individuals that only provide (in-house) facilitation are excluded.
- Information about the providers and curricula is primarily based on findings from the company websites and/or event websites. Prices are converted to Euro and are approximate.
- We encourage each provider to help us to complete and verify this overview. Are you a Design Sprint (public training) provider and would you like to be added to the list? Or would you like to see us making changes or adding details? Please fill in our questionnaire. The questionnaire also leaves space for additional comments.

