Jake Knapp
Where to hear and read about Jake Knapp1 episode or test
Jake Knapp co-created the Design Sprint, which began as a one-week prototype that rescued a stalled Google project, and with John Zeratsky later built the two-day Foundation Sprint for early startups. The lesson most worth taking is to settle who the customer is and how you are radically different before building anything, then test that hypothesis fast.
Every new product has at its core a hypothesis. There is a founding hypothesis. It's just usually not explicit.
Rapidly test and validate any startup idea with the 2-day Foundation Sprint
Jake Knapp: the story and the lessons
1How Jake Knapp's Google prototype became the Design Sprint
A one-week prototype rescued a project that had stalled for three years. Knapp's side project at Google had gone nowhere for three years, and its Stockholm office faced closure after the financial crisis. A pitch, PRD and design could not win over Larry, Sergey and Eric, so the team built a prototype for fellow Googlers instead.
That prototype became Google Meet. The aim was a prototype so real that people react as if it were real and want it. Knapp calls it probably the most productive week he has ever had.
Google Ventures refined the week into map, sketch, decide, prototype, test. Over five years at Google Ventures, about 200 teams helped shape the Design Sprint. Knapp and Zeratsky have since worked with teams at Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Slack and Uber.
The method appears in their book Click, and its excerpt is among the most popular posts in Lenny's newsletter.
Pre-seed startups showed Knapp the Design Sprint was missing a first step. Established companies already knew their positioning, but pre-product startups did not. The same questions kept returning: what problem, who is the ideal customer, how are we different, who are the real competitors.
Knapp, Zeratsky and Eli Blee-Goldman founded Character Capital and built the Foundation Sprint in 2021 and 2022. They now run it right after each investment, and they run more of them than design sprints.
2How Knapp and Zeratsky run a Foundation Sprint
Knapp has the core team clear its calendar for about 10 hours. The co-founders, or in a larger company the leads of product, engineering, design and marketing, follow a scripted sequence in two blocks of four to six hours. Making the key decisions together gives everyone one picture of the project instead of three.
Founders who run it say it compresses three to four months of work into three to four weeks.
Everyone writes silently, the team votes, and one decider makes the call. The decider is usually the CEO. Silence and structure let a team get through many decisions fast and save energy for the ones that matter.
When teams look up from writing, they see answers they did not expect, which is where the early value shows.
The basics come first: customer, problem, competition and advantages. Competition includes workarounds like art fairs, because if a problem is worth solving, people already cope with it somehow. Advantages draw on the team's insight, motivation and capabilities, since startups cannot beat big companies on scale or distribution.
Teams are often surprised that their answers matched on only about two of six items, and that the problem was less clear than they thought.
The two days end in one fill-in-the-blank founding hypothesis. If we solve this problem for this customer with this approach, they will choose it over the competitors because of two differentiators. Latchet's read: a social sales app for artisans, with the full stack as backup, chosen over Shopify and Etsy because it is cooperative and easy to use.
Different people on a team often hold different hidden versions. The word hypothesis signals something to test, not a promise it will work.
3Knapp on differentiation
Differentiation is the main event because new products are ignored by default. People guard their attention, so a product needs a promise clear and strong enough to be tried. Knapp and Zeratsky say the promise is the customer's, not the technology or market story told to investors.
Teams that skip it end up painting a message onto the product at the end, as a marketing page or sales deck.
Knapp's 2x2 chart puts the product alone top right and rivals in Loserville. The team scores the product and each competitor, keeps the two strongest scales, and plots each competitor tough. Both must be true: the team can deliver it and customers care.
Latchet chose helps you grow and cooperative against Etsy, Shopify and an art fair table. Mellow chose mobile first and works out of the box.
Warm up on seven classic scales, then write custom differentiators. The classics are fast to slow, smart to not so smart, easy to hard to use, free to expensive, focused to one size fits all, simple to complicated, and integrated to siloed. Custom ones offer customers a new lens on the world.
Mellow wrote about 25 custom differentiators, such as purposeful, magical, clear and personal, before choosing two. Honest scoring dropped the ones it could not deliver.
Knapp says to score honestly and accept you will not win everywhere. Driving home one or two things customers care about, where you are radically better, improves the odds of product market fit. Mellow was not best on every scale, and that sharpened its message.
Scoring across the whole range shows where you will win and gives comfort that trailing on some scales is fine.
Price is rarely a lasting differentiator, except for some AI products. Big rivals can run underpriced loss leaders. AI can make price real when it solves problems software could not touch before, as BindWell does by designing precision pesticides without a large team of R&D chemists.
They mention a rule of thumb of about 10x cheaper, because AI output may be a bit worse than a human process.
Differentiators become principles in a one-page mini manifesto. The 2x2 plus a few principles guides everyday choices, and the first day reaches it in about four hours. Latchet's principle is that sellers should help each other and earn more.
Google's list of ten things found true said fast is better than slow, and people used it to pick the approach that rendered 12 milliseconds faster.
Knapp saw every big hit make one promise worth switching for. Gmail beat Hotmail and Yahoo with massive storage and great search. Slack promised fun and better teamwork, and ChatGPT replaced Google search with zero clicks and a direct answer.
Those teams had no Foundation Sprint, but each had clear differentiation. The method came from looking back at them for patterns.
4Choosing an approach and testing it in weekly design sprints
Knapp has teams list several paths and name a backup. Latchet had four approaches in mind: an app, a newsletter platform, a Shopify plugin or the full stack. It picked a social sales app with the full stack as backup.
A team locked on one path asks what if this doesn't work? With a backup, failure feels less scary and the team can pivot fast.
Magic lenses turn a vague debate into one picture of the choice. Each approach is plotted on 2x2 charts for customer, pragmatic, growth, money and differentiation, and teams add custom lenses. Mellow's lens asks which founder says F yeah, that's exactly what I want to build.
If one option sits top right on most lenses, the decision is easy. If none wins everywhere, that is reassuring, because the team only has to pick the lens that matters most.
Weekly design sprints test one risk at a time against a scorecard. Each week the team maps the riskiest moment, builds prototypes and tests them with about four new customers alongside Etsy and Shopify. The scorecard tracks right customer, real problem, right approach, chosen over competitors and differentiation, in red, yellow or green.
Latchet's first scorecard was mostly red, sprint two flipped some to yellow, and by sprint three every box was green. The hypothesis is edited after each sprint, so the team records what it learned.
Interviews work far better with a hypothesis and a prototype. Maruthi John, a founder in the labs, had 50 conversations in a month. He said the first one using a hypothesis and prototype was night and day.
Knapp and Zeratsky note that interviews only simulate the real world, but a product that clicks is a strong signal to build.
Knapp says skip the sprint only with real product market fit. Some founders in the labs started selling quickly and wanted to stop running experiments, and they were told to stop. Base44's founder sold his company for $80 million in six months with no such process.
They treat that as selection bias, since many bright founders who did everything right still fail and never get heard.
5Knapp on building with AI without going generic
Knapp says slow down to think before building, even with AI. Building has momentum of its own, and progress in the wrong direction still hurts. A launched generic product only yields data from the few who found it, not from those who dismissed it.
Zeratsky put it as counterintuitive that going fast can slow you down in the long run. The advice is to think hard about what makes the product unique, then go as fast as possible.
Holding back the first concept keeps a team from locking in. Bob Baxley calls the first drawing the primal mark, because every later decision responds to it. The Foundation Sprint delays ideation and makes the team think about why they are unique.
A design sprint's prototype is only built on day four, but the method got distilled into just build a prototype.
Outsource the prototyping to AI, never the thinking. Two Character Labs teams vibe coded right away and got generic results, because models are trained on existing products. In their second sprint they stepped back, thought it through, and then prototyped.
Teams decide which parts are real, which are vibe coded and which are a static mockup or video. A product video means the whole thing does not have to work.
Detailed paper sketches work as prompt engineering. Planning what the customer needs to know before vibe coding beats co-designing with the LLM in open chat. A clear plan yields an opinionated product tied to the problem, the tasks and the right wording.
Doing a Foundation Sprint first leaves time for the harder work of copy and differentiation.
Rapidly test and validate any startup idea with the 2-day Foundation Sprint
The episode walks through the Foundation Sprint, a roughly 10 hour, two-day process that settles customer, problem, competition, differentiation and approach before any building starts, then tests the resulting hypothesis in weekly design sprints. Founders who run it say it compresses three to four months of work into three to four weeks, and the example startup Latchet went from a scorecard full of red to all green in three weekly sprints.
A one-week prototype rescued a project that had stalled for three years. Knapp's side project at Google had gone nowhere for three years, and its Stockholm office faced closure after the financial crisis. A pitch, PRD and design could not win over Larry, Sergey and Eric, so the team built a prototype for fellow Googlers instead.
That prototype became Google Meet. The aim was a prototype so real that people react as if it were real and want it. Knapp calls it probably the most productive week he has ever had.
Google Ventures refined the week into map, sketch, decide, prototype, test. Over five years at Google Ventures, about 200 teams helped shape the Design Sprint. Knapp and Zeratsky have since worked with teams at Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Slack and Uber.
The method appears in their book Click, and its excerpt is among the most popular posts in Lenny's newsletter.
Pre-seed startups showed Knapp the Design Sprint was missing a first step. Established companies already knew their positioning, but pre-product startups did not. The same questions kept returning: what problem, who is the ideal customer, how are we different, who are the real competitors.
Knapp, Zeratsky and Eli Blee-Goldman founded Character Capital and built the Foundation Sprint in 2021 and 2022. They now run it right after each investment, and they run more of them than design sprints.
Knapp has the core team clear its calendar for about 10 hours. The co-founders, or in a larger company the leads of product, engineering, design and marketing, follow a scripted sequence in two blocks of four to six hours. Making the key decisions together gives everyone one picture of the project instead of three.
Founders who run it say it compresses three to four months of work into three to four weeks.
Everyone writes silently, the team votes, and one decider makes the call. The decider is usually the CEO. Silence and structure let a team get through many decisions fast and save energy for the ones that matter.
When teams look up from writing, they see answers they did not expect, which is where the early value shows.
The basics come first: customer, problem, competition and advantages. Competition includes workarounds like art fairs, because if a problem is worth solving, people already cope with it somehow. Advantages draw on the team's insight, motivation and capabilities, since startups cannot beat big companies on scale or distribution.
Teams are often surprised that their answers matched on only about two of six items, and that the problem was less clear than they thought.
The two days end in one fill-in-the-blank founding hypothesis. If we solve this problem for this customer with this approach, they will choose it over the competitors because of two differentiators. Latchet's read: a social sales app for artisans, with the full stack as backup, chosen over Shopify and Etsy because it is cooperative and easy to use.
Different people on a team often hold different hidden versions. The word hypothesis signals something to test, not a promise it will work.
Differentiation is the main event because new products are ignored by default. People guard their attention, so a product needs a promise clear and strong enough to be tried. Knapp and Zeratsky say the promise is the customer's, not the technology or market story told to investors.
Teams that skip it end up painting a message onto the product at the end, as a marketing page or sales deck.
Knapp's 2x2 chart puts the product alone top right and rivals in Loserville. The team scores the product and each competitor, keeps the two strongest scales, and plots each competitor tough. Both must be true: the team can deliver it and customers care.
Latchet chose helps you grow and cooperative against Etsy, Shopify and an art fair table. Mellow chose mobile first and works out of the box.
Warm up on seven classic scales, then write custom differentiators. The classics are fast to slow, smart to not so smart, easy to hard to use, free to expensive, focused to one size fits all, simple to complicated, and integrated to siloed. Custom ones offer customers a new lens on the world.
Mellow wrote about 25 custom differentiators, such as purposeful, magical, clear and personal, before choosing two. Honest scoring dropped the ones it could not deliver.
Knapp says to score honestly and accept you will not win everywhere. Driving home one or two things customers care about, where you are radically better, improves the odds of product market fit. Mellow was not best on every scale, and that sharpened its message.
Scoring across the whole range shows where you will win and gives comfort that trailing on some scales is fine.
Price is rarely a lasting differentiator, except for some AI products. Big rivals can run underpriced loss leaders. AI can make price real when it solves problems software could not touch before, as BindWell does by designing precision pesticides without a large team of R&D chemists.
They mention a rule of thumb of about 10x cheaper, because AI output may be a bit worse than a human process.
Differentiators become principles in a one-page mini manifesto. The 2x2 plus a few principles guides everyday choices, and the first day reaches it in about four hours. Latchet's principle is that sellers should help each other and earn more.
Google's list of ten things found true said fast is better than slow, and people used it to pick the approach that rendered 12 milliseconds faster.
Knapp saw every big hit make one promise worth switching for. Gmail beat Hotmail and Yahoo with massive storage and great search. Slack promised fun and better teamwork, and ChatGPT replaced Google search with zero clicks and a direct answer.
Those teams had no Foundation Sprint, but each had clear differentiation. The method came from looking back at them for patterns.
Knapp has teams list several paths and name a backup. Latchet had four approaches in mind: an app, a newsletter platform, a Shopify plugin or the full stack. It picked a social sales app with the full stack as backup.
A team locked on one path asks what if this doesn't work? With a backup, failure feels less scary and the team can pivot fast.
Magic lenses turn a vague debate into one picture of the choice. Each approach is plotted on 2x2 charts for customer, pragmatic, growth, money and differentiation, and teams add custom lenses. Mellow's lens asks which founder says F yeah, that's exactly what I want to build.
If one option sits top right on most lenses, the decision is easy. If none wins everywhere, that is reassuring, because the team only has to pick the lens that matters most.
Weekly design sprints test one risk at a time against a scorecard. Each week the team maps the riskiest moment, builds prototypes and tests them with about four new customers alongside Etsy and Shopify. The scorecard tracks right customer, real problem, right approach, chosen over competitors and differentiation, in red, yellow or green.
Latchet's first scorecard was mostly red, sprint two flipped some to yellow, and by sprint three every box was green. The hypothesis is edited after each sprint, so the team records what it learned.
Interviews work far better with a hypothesis and a prototype. Maruthi John, a founder in the labs, had 50 conversations in a month. He said the first one using a hypothesis and prototype was night and day.
Knapp and Zeratsky note that interviews only simulate the real world, but a product that clicks is a strong signal to build.
Knapp says skip the sprint only with real product market fit. Some founders in the labs started selling quickly and wanted to stop running experiments, and they were told to stop. Base44's founder sold his company for $80 million in six months with no such process.
They treat that as selection bias, since many bright founders who did everything right still fail and never get heard.
Knapp says slow down to think before building, even with AI. Building has momentum of its own, and progress in the wrong direction still hurts. A launched generic product only yields data from the few who found it, not from those who dismissed it.
Zeratsky put it as counterintuitive that going fast can slow you down in the long run. The advice is to think hard about what makes the product unique, then go as fast as possible.
Holding back the first concept keeps a team from locking in. Bob Baxley calls the first drawing the primal mark, because every later decision responds to it. The Foundation Sprint delays ideation and makes the team think about why they are unique.
A design sprint's prototype is only built on day four, but the method got distilled into just build a prototype.
Outsource the prototyping to AI, never the thinking. Two Character Labs teams vibe coded right away and got generic results, because models are trained on existing products. In their second sprint they stepped back, thought it through, and then prototyped.
Teams decide which parts are real, which are vibe coded and which are a static mockup or video. A product video means the whole thing does not have to work.
Detailed paper sketches work as prompt engineering. Planning what the customer needs to know before vibe coding beats co-designing with the LLM in open chat. A clear plan yields an opinionated product tied to the problem, the tasks and the right wording.
Doing a Foundation Sprint first leaves time for the harder work of copy and differentiation.