Umango: co-creating a new product through online design sprints

Of course, this topic is very dear to our hearts at Leap Forward, so during a short research track and design sprint we explored new concepts aimed at helping companies embrace digital transformation.

It was at this moment that Covid-19 decided to show up, unfortunately, but by implementing a fully digital and online approach we hardly missed a beat. Turns out design sprints work almost as well online, and within a few weeks we had a rough idea of what we wanted to test: a social platform & knowledge base that connects employees within a company. We called it Umango.

After a few iterations and some fine tuning of our prototype we were ready to test our idea with potential clients & experts to gather their insights.

The input we received convinced us that the idea has a lot of potential, but of course it’s not realistic to design, build & launch an entire platform from scratch. Instead, we ran another design sprint to create an MVP and answer a simple question - which features are absolutely essential to Umango? Everything else was added to a giant, well documented backlog which served as our future roadmap. In the end, we focused on helping companies facilitate great stand-ups, or team huddles as we call them, for hybrid teams of on-site & remote employees. A challenge all of us are facing at this very moment.

After a new prototype, a new round of testing and a new branding & visual identity to top it all off, Umango had all the info they needed to go ahead and build their platform. Last week we were incredibly proud to see Elke & Eline introduce Umango to the world and launch the first version of their platform. Make sure to check it out and give it a try, there’s still a lot more to come!

👉 Discover Umango !