12 typical project challenges
sustainable transport | loyalty + subscription | food + drink | smarter money | omnichannel retail | tech + mobile | connected health | growth + proposition | brand + experience
12 new customer, market or technology opportunities, that teams needed to explore differently. Working together on live projects, I bring fresh insight and introduce creative lean innovation, product and service design capabilities to your team - to shape ideas, design, test and prototype, and scale up.
The Foroka approach brings both experience delivering on the inside of large companies with complicated challenges, and partnering with startups on a mission. Projects range from just a few days, to working as part of your team for 3-12 months.
For more information about the design of these projects, how the work developed, what the results and legacy capabilities were, contact Rich
“Our margins are under attack from new customer behaviour, new digital competition. How can our customer strategy team use our brand heritage to grow by £1bn with major new customer propositions, products and services?”
Rich was on site, embedded with a senior client project team 3-4 days a week, over 6 months - facilitating design sprints, and introducing lean innovation tools to research, develop and test new customer propositions in retail stores. 6 major new propositions were designed, with 3 successfully going into live pilot phases.
retail growth
vision, proposition design + launch
“National Health Service resources are under pressure from an ageing population. How can our startup team create integrated digital and physical care, to nudge patients with long term conditions to look after themselves better, reduce hospital admissions and free resource to invest elsewhere?”
Rich shaped the project with a health tech startup, and led a team of researchers, creative and business designers, who spent time in patients’ families homes.
Together, we developed a combined app, device and patient family support system prototype, drawing on behavioural science insights. The concept then successfully secured NHS innovation funding.
connected health
product + service design
“As a mid-sized bank, how can our brand partnership team cut through the noise of big competitors and new digital challengers, to create products that stand out because they're better, not just cheaper? How can we build confidence to invest in innovation, when our recent launches haven't succeeded?”
In an era of fintech startups and challenger banks in the UK, lots of digital banking experiences were looking pretty similar - sometimes using the same ‘off the shelf’ digital platform and features.
Our role was to clarify the target customers, based on the brand’s strengths and potential, identify fresh customer behaviours and needs, and create new propositions that would stand out.
When others had vast sums to throw behind advertising, we created concepts that tapped into unmet needs, so that the value of the product would cut through the noise.
Using ‘feels real’ digital experiments, we gathered evidence for customer interest in taking the products, and understood which features they were drawn to - so that tech delivery resources weren’t stretched across novel features that customers didn’t value.
digital finance
product + service design
“Cities are congested, growth is constrained, quality of life damaged. 'Mobility As A Service' uses digital tools to integrate journey planning and ticketing across transport services. How can a global engineering consultancy team turn 'MaaS' into a proven customer and business model? How might we shift commutes to low carbon public transport, with a subscription as easy as the car on your drive?”
Rich took early MaaS experiments and imagined a future where digital transport subscriptions could mirror the simple integration of transport systems in cities like London or Singapore - making it an easier choice for city residents to use sustainable public transport, and at lower cost than older ticketing tech and physical interchange infrastructure.
Working with research, creative and service design colleagues, and partnering with local authorities, we designed experiences that worked for different types of transport customers - creating a model that consultants could replicate with their city authority clients across the world.
sustainable transport
product + service design
“Everyone in our market is launching challenger brands, using new tech platforms. We’re an established player, how might our marketing, product and commercial team create a unique proposition to attract younger customers, and how can we test it before we invest too much?”
Rich designed and led a project to explore the potential of a brand owned by the business, which had been a pioneer of online savings in the 1990s.
We introduced new research techniques - to uncover how people spend and save, rather than asking them what they think about banking.
It resulted in a prototype digital proposition that gathered people’s ambitions for their life in ‘+10’ years’ time, information on the current finances, and mapped out a plan to get there - that adapted with their changing priorities and circumstances over time.
digital finance
product + service design
“Customers expectations of shopping inspiration and value have shifted rapidly. How can our omnichannel team reinvent a brand’s retail proposition for the instant digital shopping age - with seamless integration between new high street experiences and online advice?”
When Amazon is hard to beat on price and convenience for ‘everything’, for millions of customers, how do retail brands with a longer legacy fight back?
Rich worked with a small team to research the customer proposition and operations of digital-first rivals - identifying where they were less able to serve customers’ needs.
We then created an outline premium subscription proposition, which included live in-store and online product advice.
Putting together a cross-functional squad, we ran a series of sprints to live test a ‘feels real’ version of same day delivery and offering customers colleagues’ product expertise.
Evidence from these early prototypes and trials proved that there was demand for more than just rapid delivery, and for trusted brands to edit the choices in a world of confusing, unlimited options.
The data allowed us to make a business case for further digital development, testing and scaling.
lloyalty + subscription
new proposition design
customer experience strategy
“Our digital telecoms brand is run by members, who provide customer support and new product ideas. How can our community team reinforce the brand, by getting more member customers involved in designing its future? What new ways of working might our team need to explore this?”
Rich shaped a project team of lean experiment creatives and the brand’s community managers, to create a series of ‘test and learn’ experiments with members - to explore customers’ engagement with developing new product ideas for the brand.
Instead of internal debates about what customers might want next, and how involved they really wanted to be in designing the future of ‘their’ brand, there was now clear evidence of which ideas, and way of exploring them, were motivating for customers.
mobile telecoms community
test + learn experiments lab
“Our organisation isn’t designed for the customer experience we need to deliver. How can we clarify our strategy, prioritise our roadmaps, create motivating roles and objectives, How might we re-organise our teams and projects?”
Rich headed a team of 80 customer experience, innovation, service and digital design colleagues for a year, during a major business re-organisation and brand refresh, across the Covid pandemic.
We introduced new common customer experience principles across digital, store design and colleague service delivery.
Working across business functions, we pinpointed pain point improvement areas, and narrowed disparate experience initiatives into fewer, more memorable customer propositions.
Rich led the design of new store format concepts, to create more flagship ‘day out’ experience inspiration, and bring the brand closer to more customers with new digital services and local ‘edit’ stores.
We re-defined roles and responsibilities to make it easier for teams to collaborate across digital and physical store environments, rather than operating as separate channels.
omnichannel retail
new proposition design
customer experience strategy
“We’re taking risks by relying on manual systems to make sure we’re compliant with regulations, and to anticipate market sentiments. How might we experiment with using AI and automation so that colleagues can focus on their expertise and planning the future, not just administration? What do humans do well vs what do machines do better?
Rich brought together a project team of digital and organisation designers, plus colleagues from different business functions, to imagine different versions of future operations - incorporating new artificial intelligence and automation technology.
By setting a vision of the future, we were able to explore the kind of roles, skills and people that would be needed in the future.
Setting up an innovation and experiments lab team, we introduced digital prototyping techniques to simulate how new technology might be used.
By introducing practical ‘test and learn’ experiments, we were able to provide early evidence of how technology might free up colleagues to use their skills and creativity to add more value, rather than spending time on uninspiring manual processes.
digital finance
product experiments lab
“As founders, we had a clear vision for our product and business, but growth has stalled, and we feel we’ve lost our way a little. How might we work differently as a team, to re-position our coffee brand to stand out in a crowded market - staying true to the founders’ story and the quality of the product?”
Rich facilitated a series of workshops, to bring fresh thinking about a changing coffee market, as some customers seek more specialist beans, some look for hassle-free quality, some just a moment of escape, and others want ultimate convenience or value.
We then developed a long list of brand propositions and promises, to create a distinctive customer proposition that would cut through to customers and retail buyers. Narrowing options based on what felt authentic to the founding vision, the products, and the target customers.
Ultimately, this has led to the brand being re-positioned around the line of ‘makers of first sip bliss’, representing simple quality and a moment of escape in a busy day.
food + drink scale up
brand + proposition strategy
“Lots of large companies have bold net zero targets - including switching to electric vehicles. How can our startup team make the transition to fleets of EV vans work, when many drivers’ homes don’t have off street parking to charge overnight?”
What if van driver could pick up a giant battery pack on the way home, charge overnight inside the vehicle, and return the pack to a hub on the way to work the next day?
Rich joined the startup founder to define the customer experience, service design, proposition and brand.
Critical to the experience was uncovering a ‘day in the life’ of fleet van drivers, like energy companies - by riding with them, exploring the layout of their vans, and listening to their priorities.
Working with a partner design agency, we developed a series of battery pack and van installation prototypes, a roadside battery collection hub, and a digital experience for overnight charging.
Developing a brand and experience that tapped into modern van drivers’ lifestyles, and fleet operators’ commercial needs, the startup has now secured partnerships to develop the venture.
sustainable transport
venture, brand + service design
“Drinking and socialising habits are changing. But we’re using conventional consumer product innovation. How might we introduce design thinking skills to the business, to stretch a leading craft beer brand into new low alcohol products and hospitality experiences?”
Rich joined a new project team, 4 days a week, for 6 months, to introduce lean innovations tools and techniques during live project sprints.
We focused on helping the team to uncover the behaviours and motivations behind customers buying or considering lower alcohol products. Then generating new creative product and experience ideas, and defining experiments to test out the concepts.
By simulating real physical and digital products and experiences, we were able to test demand, before rushing ahead to product development investment.
The team are now armed with new skills for lean customer behaviour research, product idea generation, experiments and prototypes, and blueprints to launch and scale.
food + drink
introducing design thinking
Work delivered by Rich Warmsley whilst working for great brands, with specialist innovation companies (including Market Gravity and Fluxx, now part of larger groups) and directly by Foroka.