AI takes on more of the work every month, but deciding where it belongs, what's worth building, and how the work should change still takes human judgment. We give teams a structured way to exercise that judgment together.
We are John and Dana Vetan, co-founders of DSA. Design Sprint Academy is a Berlin-based training and facilitation company.
Before this, we ran a digital agency and worked with large organizations on product and strategy, and we kept seeing the same pattern.
Smart teams, capable leaders, real ambition, and the same things going wrong. Stakeholders misaligned before a project started. Decisions postponed for months because nobody could agree. Pilots that launched and failed because the problem was wrong, or the solution never fit the people who had to use it.
The cause was always the same. Organizations are built for execution, and they have no default process for working through an unclear problem together. Getting the right people in one place doesn't fix that. Collaboration needs structure.
So we built that structure: methods for framing problems, making decisions, and testing solutions with the people who will use them.
AI raised the stakes. Building got cheap, and deciding what to build, and how the work should change around it, became the hard part. That part runs on human judgment, and it's where we focus now.
We help organizations make high-stakes decisions faster — and with better evidence.
We work in two modes:
2018 — Problem Framing
The step before the Design Sprint, so teams start from a problem worth solving. Google invited us to teach it inside its own Design Sprint Academy.
2024 — The first AI Lab, at Turner Construction
An AI operating model built with Turner: 400+ AI applications built by employees, 70,000+ hours of capacity freed each year, and an internal AI Lab that still runs.
2025 — AI Problem Framing
How to decide which AI use cases deserve investment, and which to stop.
Early 2026 — AI Workflow Sprint
How to redesign work around AI and test it with the people who do it.
Today — AI Facilitation
Training enablement teams, FDEs, and AI delivery teams to lead AI discovery.
Plenty of firms offer consulting, training, or facilitation.
We focus on one thing: the quality of the decisions teams make about AI.
Every session starts with one question: what does this team need to leave with? Before anyone arrives, we do the work that makes the answer reachable: research reviewed, context mapped, artifacts prepared, decision-makers aligned. We measure success by what the team produces.
Large consultancies take months to produce a recommendation leadership can defend. We get there in days, because the method demands rigor from the start: real data, structured decisions, and the right people involved at the right time.
Our engagements end with the methodology installed inside your organization: playbooks, trained facilitators, and a system your team runs on its own. Turner runs its AI Lab without us today. That's the goal every time.
I recently participated in a design sprint training and it was GREAT! Design Sprint Academy was professional, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic about the seminar material and helped my group feel comfortable and confident as well. The hands-on learning was excellent, and I really appreciated getting both participant and facilitator perspectives.
The strongest outcome for me was the ability to scale capability quickly. We now deliver Problem Framing sessions in-house directly off the back of the Design Sprint Certification program.
DSA gave me a great grounding in facilitation techniques and design sprint methodology. The quality of their tuition and facilitation and attention to detail in how they present their approach sets them apart.
DSA provides an amazing training experience. John and the team have developed a professional and fun experience with just the right mix of presentation content and hands-on demonstrations. I'm confident we can apply the methodologies taught to deliver impact!
Working with Design Sprint Academy we completely unlocked the benefits of design sprints promised in the book Sprint. Design Sprints are now a cornerstone of how we work and we continue to improve them with help from the Design Sprint Academy.
DSA is one of the leading organizations on bringing the Design Sprint methodology to an ever-growing audience. They are great strategic collaborators and bring a wealth of experience from the facilitation of Design Sprints to scaled outreach and education of the broader Design Sprint Community. The team consistently produces great work and constantly shares their recent learnings and insights with the community.
Everyone has an opinion on AI. Very few people have real expertise in strategy, facilitation, and systems design. The Design Sprint Academy is one of the only places I've found where those things live together, and where no matter how much you think you know, you leave knowing more. What makes it truly special is how generous they are with their knowledge and resources that are so well designed and curated. They give you every single thing you need, from a resource perspective and confidence perspective to go back and do this work with others. I say this as someone who has been using these strategies for over a decade, yet no matter how much you think you know I promise you will leave knowing more, and learning new strategies to adapt these methods for the AI era we are in now.
DSA mastered the art of the perfect remote sprint. We had a week-long sprint and a 2-day training session with them, led by John. His expertise and efficiency in facilitating remote sprints were evident. His experience and insightful examples answered all our queries. For top-notch design sprint facilitation, choose John and his team. I highly recommend him and look forward to future collaborations.
John and the Design Sprint Academy are a highly professional team. They helped to identify the right problems, generate a context that was needed to find the right answers, and enabled our team to have creative exchanges and take a significant step forward in our project. All this considered our needs and was tailored during the process.
