Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky – Author Biography
Early Life
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky are American designers, authors, and former colleagues at Google Ventures (GV), the venture capital arm of Alphabet. Both trained as product designers and spent years building digital products before turning their attention to how teams work — and how individuals manage their attention.
Career
At GV, Knapp created the “design sprint” — a five-day process for answering critical business questions through rapid prototyping and customer testing — which he documented in the bestseller Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days (2016, with Braden Kowitz). Zeratsky was a design partner at GV, working with startups on product and growth. Together they wrote Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day (2018), applying design thinking to personal productivity: choose a daily highlight, laser-focus on it by taming technology’s distractions, and recharge with habits that sustain energy. The book became a bestseller and a favorite among knowledge workers drowning in busyness. Knapp has continued to write and teach about design sprints and work culture; Zeratsky writes about attention, technology, and the examined life.
Major Works
Their major works are Sprint (2016, Knapp with Braden Kowitz) and Make Time (2018, Knapp and Zeratsky).
Writing Style and Themes
Knapp and Zeratsky write as designers: their books are visual, structured, and relentlessly practical, full of diagrams, tactics, and experiments to try. Their great theme is intentionality — against the default settings of modern work (the endless meeting, the infinite inbox, the attention-harvesting app), they propose designing your days the way you’d design a product: with a clear goal, constraints, and rapid iteration. Make Time is less about doing more than about doing what matters, a philosophy of attention in an age of distraction.
Legacy
The design sprint is now standard practice in product teams worldwide, and Sprint is the canonical text on the method. Make Time became one of the defining productivity books of the late 2010s, influencing how a generation of tech workers thinks about focus, defaults, and the design of a good day.
