Albert is a partner and Director of Strategy at zu, a design strategy firm in Canada focused on building digital products and services. Over the last 15 years, he’s worked with brands such as Intel and Fedex, but often refers to zu’s practice as ‘blue collar design thinking’ as they are applying Sprints and modern methodologies to industries such as Government and Agriculture. Over the years, he’s been combining different techniques and activities to work with audiences of all types and sizes. Outside of zu, Albert identifies as a camp counselor and washed-up DJ.

Alexandra is the Creative Director of the Civic Design Lab (CDL), the City of Oakland Resilience Office's in-house design team that is dedicated to training government staff and making public services for low-income Oaklanders as effective and accessible as possible.

Alexandra is a full stack user experience design researcher and chatbot connoisseur, specializing in social impact and innovations. Since moving to the Bay Area in 2014 to complete her post-doc at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design Research, Alexandra published her first book on design research methods called, "Resilience by Design (Springer: 2016), which explores the application of design thinking strategies in the context of social crisis. Her goal for the next 30 years is to use her expertise to help connect people, and make the world a more accessible and friendly place for all.

Dee is a product designer and sprint guide at AJ&Smart. She studied computer science in Australia and has 9 years experience in product design and strategy across a wide range of industries. She also coaches startups at the Google Launchpad startup accelerator and organises the design events Service Jam Berlin, and UX Camp Europe.

Erik Flowers is a Principal Service Experience Designer at Intuit, a financial services company and maker of TurboTax, Mint, and QuickBooks. Through the lens of modern service design, he is re-envisioning customer experiences across Intuit’s diverse ecosystem, building the capability throughout the company to look at experiences from end-to-end and surface-to-core.

Erik is a multidisciplinary designer and developer, having spent over 20 years working with the web and technology in countless environments and contexts, from freelancing, to small businesses, startups, and large corporations.

Evie Alexander leads a team at Airbnb that's is responsible for ideating, designing and launching new products and experiences. Evie started her career in graphic design, designing identity systems, spaces, apparel and more; and eventually entered the product design world at Sonos. She went on to become versed in design thinking methods at IDEO and later to be named a Design Sprint Master while working at Google. Evie's dream Sprint would be focused on how we might make the practice of mindfulness accessible in our everyday lives.

Geoff is a Senior Design Director at IDEO.org, where he guides teams and supports designers focused on the overlap between design and social impact. An industrial designer at his core, Geoff has experience working in a range of mediums including physical products, digital services and advertising.

Prior to joining IDEO.org, Geoff led multi-disciplinary teams at design studios like Lunar, LG Electronics and co:collective. In 2013, Geoff founded the Industrial Design practice at Code and Theory, an award winning digital agency in NYC, London and SF. Geoff is a proud IDEO "boom-a-rang" employee, having started his career as an industrial designer in the IDEO Chicago office.

In his spare time, Geoff plays 3rd Base for the Bridgeport Dodgers and enjoys drawing vehicles on-demand for his sons Graham and Harrison.

Jake spent 10 years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the  Design Sprint process. He has since run it over 150 times with companies like Nest, Slack, 23andMe, and Flatiron Health. Today, teams around the world (including the British Museum and the United Nations) use Design Sprints to solve big problems and test new ideas.

Previously, Jake helped build products like Gmail, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Encarta. He is currently among the world’s tallest designers.

Jay started his career at Accenture where he spent 7 years building software inside big, inefficient silos. Aside from writing code, his typical contributions included writing 80-page specs to launch one new feature. Ahhh! But as he transitioned from corporate to startup (including his own), he gained an appreciation and mastery of practices like Agile. Now, as New Haircut's design-driven thought leader, and one of their Design Sprint Academy's facilitators, he prides himself on helping organizations evolve from talking about digital innovation, to achieving it.

Jim Kalbach is currently the Head of Customer Success at MURAL. Previously, he worked in various design-related consulting roles for large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, LexisNexis, and Citrix.

In 2007, Jim published his first full-length book, Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007). His second book, Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly, 2016) was a #1 bestseller on Amazon in the Business Development section.

John is an SVP for Corporate Capability for the Fung Academy, working globally to develop the Fung Group’s top 3000 leaders and with its 45,000 employees to develop capability in innovation, data science and other areas. Previously he founded IDEO’s Singapore office and was global head of marketing and product development for Onkyo.

John is a problem solver, which comes in handy as a Product Manager. But in 2015, it was New Haircut that had problems -- they were still building digital products for companies based off of specs and what they managed to glean from an RFP. And rarely did they find time to talk with users. John knew there had to be a way to create things more collaboratively and efficiently. That's when he discovered design sprints. Since then, John has incorporated design sprints into New Haircut's product development process, enabling them to move from idea to launch, creating innovative, user-centered experiences -- the same process which he now teaches and consults within their Design Sprint Academy.

Karwai (Kar) is a Hong Kong-based design strategist with a strong passion for design ethics.

She has worked across a range of financial services, telecoms and retail clients in London and Hong Kong, using design thinking and service design to help businesses improve customer experiences and services.

Over the past year, she worked on a joint project with her London-based colleague (Will) to evolve our one-size-fits-all design process and recently shared this at SXSW. She is now testing a new conscious design framework with clients in Asia.

Maarten Pieters is Head of Co-creation and People Insight for the award-winning Design and User Experience department at Philips Lighting. Together with his team he works across all departments to inspire the whole organisation to adopt a co-creative approach. His main mission is to transform Philips Lighting into a truly co-creative organisation.

Before starting at Philips Lighting Maarten co-founded TheCoCreators, and was also a founding member of a growth innovation agency. He worked for various international clients in a.o Manufacturing, FMCG, Retail, Telecom, and Education industry. Maarten has a deep passion for helping organisations become 'complete co-creation' driven. Next to this, Maarten is co-author of 'The Seven Principles Of Complete Co-creation', which is due end 2017.

Marta Rey-Babarro is the co-founder of the Design Sprint Academy and the lead researcher for a new education initiative at Google. The Design Sprint Academy aims to spread innovative ways of working, putting the user first, and including all roles of a (digital) product or service. From the first day on, the Academy has been very successful. Not surprisingly, one of Marta's favorite roles at Google is being a sprint master. In this role, she has helped more than 50+ different teams to define new products and services, processes, create project visions or redesign websites.

Mike is the Co-Founder of Moonshot by Pactera Digital. As VP of Digital Products, Mike oversees the alignment of digital product services with client needs in the areas of next generation user experiences, amplified intelligence, data and cloud platforms, and continuous velocity.

Nadya Direkova is a designer focused on speed of innovation. She works as a Director of R&D at Airbnb and is a Founding member of the Samara division. To date, she has hosted over 100 design sprints to accelerate projects at Airbnb, Google [x] and Alphabet. Her key vision sprints include work with the White House, Self-Driving cars, Project Loon, Maps and Google Ads among others. She envisioned & co-founded the Google Sprint Master Academy to empower 300 senior creatives to run design sprints.

Pontus is a serial entrepreneur and founder of multiple startups in Europe and in North America. He holds a Master of Science in computer science from the Royal Institute of Technology, as well as several design and technology patents in Europe and the United States. Pontus runs the product innovation agency Bontouch.

Bontouch partners with brands such as Post-it® and Coca-Cola to create unique and transformative analog-to-digital customer experiences. With 85 designers and engineers on staff, Bontouch serves clients in North America, Europe and Asia from three studios in New York, London, and Stockholm. Today, the products that Bontouch helps create are used by more than 50 million people in 196 countries.

Richard builds and re-establishes a culture of innovation for the Fung Group and its partners to change how the world works. He cultivates the capabilities of the people in the Group by engaging the businesses to create new value. Within the Academy, he re-enforces the concepts of ‘doing is learning’ and ‘learning by doing’. Apart from his role as a catalyst, Richard also acts as a coach and convener. Internally, he breeds curiosity and instigates tension as motivation across the Group. Externally, he thinks collaboratively about new questions with clients, while inspiring new opportunities with partners. He considers design a business enabler.

As director of user experience design for Google Cloud, Sara leads research & design teams that deliver products and services to help people and businesses thrive. Her product development approach focuses on building empathy through directly observed insights and driving innovation through experimentation, iterative design and testing. Before joining Google in 2015, Sara led high performance user experience design teams at bay area start-ups, agencies, global consumer retail and banking companies.

Sarah Plantenberg is a design principal at IBM and is currently located in San Francisco, CA. Sarah is most recently known for her work helping establish and scale the IBM Bluemix Garage and its worldwide design practice. It was during this work that Sarah cultivated methods that improve business outcomes by integrating lean design approaches into development and business organizations in IBM and its enterprise clients.

Sarah is especially passionate about taking a hypothesis-driven, human-centered approach to business outcomes, and her thought leadership has penetrated all levels of her clients’ businesses. From the C-suite to the “boots on the ground,” Sarah works simultaneously at the individual and organizational level to bring alignment around outcomes, get something in the hands of the user as quickly as possible, and iterate with purpose until the user is happy and the business sees their desired impact.

When not designing, Sarah enjoys delving into innovation and is the co-inventor on 5 patent. Sarah also enjoys hiking with Dora, her German Shepherd.

Surya Vanka is founder of AUTHENTIC, a design studio based in Seattle. He has worked as a multidiscipline designer at non-profits, startups, small businesses and large corporations for more than 20 years. Surya is best known for his work in user experience and for creating industry leading design practices such Design Swarms and Design Value Scorecard. He led Microsoft’s center of design excellence for several years, and helped transform the company towards an experience-first culture. Surya was a tenured professor of design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, fellow at the Center for Advanced Study and has taught design on every continent except Antarctica - he looks forward to teaching a design workshop at the South Pole one day.

Vidya has a passion for coaching product leaders, product teams and founders. She has over 18 years of experience specializing in developing, managing and launching products. Vidya serves as Senior Program Director for Luma Institute, an organization dedicating to teaching organizations how to innovate. Vidya is also co-founder and principal at Product Rebels – a business dedicated to coaching customer-driven product managers and founders globally. Vidya has held multiple executive roles at leading companies, including VP Innovation, VP Product Management at Mitchell International, and Director of Customer Experience Development for Intuit.

Will is a design strategist who loves experimenting with the design process and exploring ethical design, based in London.

He works with global clients across multiple sectors including retail, automotive, financial services and telecoms. Applying design thinking and service design to the process, meanwhile championing and testing conscious design frameworks.

Will has been working with his Hong Kong-based colleague (Kar) to evolve our one-size-fits all design process and recently presented their findings at SXSW. He is now testing a new conscious design framework with clients in Europe.