Leadership bio
John Vetan
Strategic Innovation Consultant & Keynote Speaker | Co-Founder & CEO, Design Sprint Academy
“Innovation shouldn’t be a buzzword—it should be fast, tangible, and repeatable.”
— John Vetan
— John Vetan
Strategic Innovation Consultant & Keynote Speaker | Co-Founder & CEO, Design Sprint Academy
John helps Fortune 500 leaders and executive teams turn ambiguity into aligned action. As the co-founder of Design Sprint Academy, he’s spent the past 20+ years helping organizations break through inertia and solve complex product and business challenges—fast.
John partners directly with product leaders, executive teams, and consultants across sectors like finance, energy, healthcare, and government. His work blends facilitation, innovation strategy, and product thinking to create clarity where there’s noise and speed where there’s stagnation.
His mission is simple: make innovation tangible, structured, and doable—especially when the stakes are high.
John Vetan’s main expertise in innovation and business transformation centers on helping organizations adopt design sprints as a structured, collaborative problem-solving process within their innovation, product development, and business workflows. He specializes in facilitating and training teams to rapidly validate and de-risk new business ideas, launch new products and services, and implement customer-centric decision-making across diverse industries
Trusted by companies like Google, SAP, Roche, Adidas, HSBC, R/GA, Turner Construction Company, Red Bull, and The World Bank, John is known for introducing problem framing and design sprints not as a workshop trend—but as a repeatable process for aligned, cross-functional problem solving. He equips teams to work faster, de-risk decisions earlier, and rally stakeholders around solutions that matter.
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.
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.
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.
Both the problem framing and the design sprint were conducted under excellent moderation. The DSA facilitator was strict on time when required, inspirational when possible, and demanding and ambitious when needed!
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.
John runs Google’s Global Design Sprint Chapters in Berlin, London, and Dubai, and regularly speaks at Google SprintCon events in San Francisco. In 2019, he co-organized the exclusive "Design Sprints for Change" conference with Google Design in London.
In 2024, he delivered a keynote at Miro’s Canvas 24 on “Prototyping at the Speed of AI,” showcasing how AI-powered prototyping can unlock creativity in teams without formal design roles.
As a thought leader, John shares frameworks like the 4U Framework and Cynefin, demonstrating how simple tools—applied in the right context—can drive outsized organizational impact. His articles on the Design Sprint Academy blog are widely read by product leaders and strategists worldwide.
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John leads tailored consulting engagements that combine strategic clarity with practical execution:
High-stakes strategy sessions that align leaders on what matters most.
Focused sessions that turn uncertainty into customer-validated AI solutions.
Grassroots innovation that spreads from focused teams to the whole organization.
Whether you’re planning an executive offsite, shaping innovation strategy, or looking for a keynote that moves people to act—John brings the clarity and tools to make it count.
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