Ex-Googler Collaborates With Berlin-Based Product Design Studio, AJ&Smart, to Help Thousands of Designers Double Their Hourly Rate

BERLIN, May 22, 2018 (Newswire.com) - ​Online courses are lucrative business, but that’s not why AJ&Smart (a Berlin-based studio who solve the problems of Silicon Valley giants) is today launching the most accessible and practical way to learn the process used by some of the world’s best-known companies. Instead they’re releasing an online Masterclass because they’re genuinely passionate about making the Design Sprint as openly used as possible.

The Design Sprint is a process coined by Google Ventures, namely Jake Knapp, an ex-Google employee who went on to write the NY Times best selling book “Sprint.” In short, the process takes what was normally months, or even years, of work and condenses it (through a variety of exercises and processes) down to just 5 days where the same, if not better, results are produced. Because of this, the process is now being adopted by some of the world’s biggest companies, which the team at AJ&Smart anticipated might happen, so they moved from a traditional agency to one that focuses solely on the Design Sprint two years ago, and have worked with everyone from Airbnb and LEGO, to some of the world’s largest banking groups since then. Their efforts caught the attention of Knapp, who started working closely with the ambitious agency last year, and who worked with the company to make an updated 2.0 version of the Design Sprint.

Even with the huge demand from leading companies, there still lacked a ‘formal’ and comprehensive training of the process, and the need for people with this skill set is only going to grow. The demand for this knowledge is so great in-fact that already AJ&Smart has seen a huge wave of people pre-enroll in the course before it was even available.

“We generally put all our secrets out there for free,” says AJ&Smart CEO & Co-Founder Jonathan Courtney. “If you go on our YouTube channel you’ll see that there are hundreds of hours of material on there, where we basically share how we do things at AJ&Smart. The course was created because we had a lot of people asking us to provide an immersive step-by-step guide to the whole Sprint process, so we basically stopped nearly everything we were doing at the company and made exactly that for people, which is the main reason we’re charging money for it.”

After personal experience and a lot of research, the team realized that they could help Designers (and those working in tech in general) more than double their hourly rate and massively increase people’s hireability, given the demand for people who can successfully facilitate the Design Sprint.

AJ&Smart’s CEO Jonathan Courtney continues, “We’re excited to continue to share our ‘secrets’ both as part of our new course, and also readily for free on our YouTube channel — we don’t care about more people being able to offer the same thing we offer to clients — we’re just super excited about the prospect of more people having the skills ot do this properly, because it actually works and we really believe it’s the future of how companies will work, and how teams will collaborate better together.” 

AJ&Smart’s Design Sprint Masterclass launches today, and includes over 55 lessons and all the resources the AJ&Smart team use when running a Design Sprint with a client, including slide decks and result delivery templates.

-For comments, and/or interview requests please contact Laura Faint: [email protected]

-A small selection of images can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pfs7VUgH4X_Kf0dBUJoCD70zgqCE0KOf?usp=sharing

-For others please contact [email protected]

-More information about AJ&Smart’s newly launched Design Sprint Masterclass can be found here: https://ajsmart.com/masterclass and more information about AJ&Smart in general can be found here: https://ajsmart.com

-The course costs €1,497 and includes everything needed to facilitate a Design Sprint.

-AJ&Smart’s YouTube channel can be found here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeB_OpLspKJGiKv1CYkWFFw and Jonathan & Jake Knapp host a podcast together, called The Product Breakfast club which can be found here: https://itunes.apple.com/de/podcast/the-product-breakfast-club/id1320916842?l=en&mt=2

-AJ&Smart was founded in 2011 by Jonathan Courtney & Michael Smart

Source: AJ&Smart