Strategy & Innovation · Health & Wellness
A one-week innovation sprint at Everlywell that fueled the product team's backlog for a year. The sprint pulled double-triple duty — enhancing the customer lifecycle, generating foundational artifacts the team badly needed, and kickstarting a group of early-career hires through the Forming and Storming stages of team building.
The Ask
Everlywell had the ability to communicate meaningful insights and actionable results to its customers — but wasn't doing it well, and in many cases wasn't doing it at all. Long-term customer engagement was being left on the table. The customer lifecycle was ending where it should have been extending.
The product team ready to tackle it was cross-functional, energetic, and almost entirely early-career or newly hired. They needed the sprint to deliver product outcomes and serve as a scaffold for a team still forming and storming its way toward high-trust collaboration.
The Approach
Empower customers to form good habits and change lifestyles · generate revenue with tailored recommendations · tell a compelling brand story that turns customers into customers-for-life. One problem statement, three shots at value.
Grounded the team in customer insights and existing data. Then sketching, dot-voting, and rapid divergent-thinking exercises pushed every team member — regardless of role or seniority — to contribute concepts.
Storyboards translated concepts into experiences the team could look at, argue about, and iterate. Prototypes went from Post-it to clickable in days, not weeks — so the team learned by seeing, not by debating in the abstract.
The readout wasn't just "look what we made." It was themed, prioritized, and mapped to the product roadmap so what came out of the room had a clear path to what came next.
The sprint isn't just the work. It's how the team learns to work together.
The operating thesis behind running the sprint with an early-career team
The Outcome
What Made It Work
A tight problem statement gave the team permission to diverge widely. Nobody sketched in the wrong direction because everybody knew what they were sketching toward.
You can argue about a slide. You can experience a storyboard. Concepts became testable the moment they became narrative.
A cross-functional team stuck in Forming needs a shared success to move to Storming. The sprint gave them one — plus the personas and journey maps they'd been missing.
Selected Artifacts
