Sprinting innovation for a global fitness brand

From 2020 to 2024, I led the Design Team at POWER SHIFTER Digital to consistently partner with a global fitness brand to efficiently make decisions about new product potential.

The name of this global fitness brand has purposefully been redacted due to NDAs. In accordance with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted confidential information in this case story. The information in this case study is my own and does not reflect the views of this company.

My Role

For three years and counting, I have led a team of six UX Researchers and UI Designers (junior to senior level) to ideate, propose, and execute strategic projects that partner with Directors, Senior Strategists, and Program Leads from this client's Innovation team. With 15+ projects so far, each have a unique vision and directive, but what has remained is our differentiation:

• Genuine care and attention to detail
• Collaborative design sprints and research
• Responsive direct-to-expert communication
• Quality data analysis and actionable findings

The Challenge

Validating Consumer needs by what they do

A constant theme in 10 of our past projects together have been to understand how our client might assist or empower their consumer base to become the best versions of themselves through behavioural and emotional motivation.

By ironing out the primary research questions and matching them with project objectives, our team has become more and more creative at co-designing strategies that provide quality insights that help our client understand their audience better, and get real-world feedback through prototypes that are embedded into their target market's everyday lives.

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The Solutions

Ready-to-invest concepts that clients are proud of

From tangible products given to Olympic athletes to new workout app features, the outcomes from projects have led directly to further investments into new concepts, most notably:

Refined and Research-backed Personas

Pinpointing the consumer’s emotional, mental, and behavioural states helped stakeholders gain confidence in anchoring tens of thousands of dollars on a solid "why", validating product-market fit.

Futurist-Forward Design Pillars

Based on the triangulation of qualitative research and iterating on sample sizes of 10-15 people from retail staff to current and potential customers, our team honed in on fundamental design pillars that would take the brand through evolution and extensions 10-20 years into the future.

Direct-to-Expert Concept Ideation

I've facilitated 3-day Design Sprints and cross-country hybrid workshops that involve 20+ stakeholders in a room (virtual and physical) to collaborate on experience prototypes. Even though the first moments always raise eyebrows, I create a guard-free environment where each and every stakeholder is coalesced into brainstorming as one. Cross-functional workshops tend to generate the most creative thinking and talked-about concepts.

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The Process

Discovering different audience needs

Starting with personas developed in-house by our client's design team, we often lead with workshops or design sprints to bring expectations, "must-have" and "nice-to-have" requirements in alignment.

Developing Opportunities with Co-Design

The first day of workshops usually include 10-15 stakeholders, and then the subsequent days narrow the group to designers and technical team members, along with guest SME specialists such as linguists or PhD-level scientists. The juices get flowing and individual sketching and paper prototyping come together in an art gallery-style show-and-tell. Our team then leaves with concepts to build Figma prototypes with, with the occasional developer creating low-fidelity Webflow websites once approved for experimentation.

We often integrate tools such as Twilio, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Zendesk and other software systems that make a realistic prototype work over 5-14 days in the field. Data analysis is done using Excel, Miro (AI), and SPSS when needed.

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The Outcomes

A Business Case for Brand Investment

While all our projects get positive feedback shared during Retrospectives, some get moved directly to Brand teams to implement into apps, websites, and retail store initiatives. Other findings from our project outputs propel teams to delve further into a particular gap that needs exploration and addressing, usually circling back to our team for a new SOW. Of course there are times when a project just does not have potential. Sometimes a concrete "no" saves money in the long-run. Regardless the outcome, our responsive feedback and attention to detail makes this client feel like our design team is just an extension of their own.