Zero → Traction with Founders

Founders

Founders is a startup studio that partners with entrepreneurs, designers and developers to take companies from zero to traction.

Over the course of 7 months, I was part of the small team that conceptualized and launched the alpha version of Wonderwerk, a learning and development platform for the modern workforce. While working on Wonderwerk, I also helped out other teams at Founders with ideation, conceptualisation and design on their products.

Wonderwerk

A good learning culture is the key to happy and smart employees — but despite a willingness to invest in it, corporate learning initiatives are often ineffective. This realization is what initially prompted us to start working on Wonderwerk; a learning platform for the modern workforce.

We started out exploring the problem space of corporate learning culture as just a 2-person team, with my responsibilities focused around product strategy, UX and design. During the time I was involved, we interviewed 30+ employees and HR professionals across Denmark, Germany and the US, explored and prototyped several distinct product directions, and eventually started seeing the first signs of problem-solution fit.

Wonderwerk is a platform that allows companies to easily manage the entire process around employee development and learning. Employees can easily request access to conferences, books or courses, and put together learning plans in collaboration with their managers – and managers can easily follow up and manage their budgets. At the same time, companies get access to valuable insights about which topics their employees are engaged in, and where their employee development spending is going.

We eventually scaled the the team to 5 people, and put together a customer panel of companies that we onboarded to the alpha release of Wonderwerk for further iteration and exploration.

The team eventually moved to Berlin to found the company there, and rather than join them, I made the decision to move on to new opportunities. Since I left, the team has further iterated on the product, and continues to explore for an optimal product-market fit.

DayOne

DayOne is a SaaS product looking to enable the best and most efficient “day one” experiences for new employee onboarding.

The product manages the onboarding and offboarding processes end-to-end: onboarding emails and relevant information, integrations with email and software subscriptions, pre-configured hardware setups, and everything else a company might need.

I was involved in the initial product conceptualization, including:

• Facilitating a Brand Sprint with the founders to define the company DNA and vision.
• Researching and defining jobs-to-be-done for each customer segment.
• Running an Object-Oriented UX workshop to scope the initial functionality of the product.
• User story mapping for initial releases, and mapping out the relevant task flows for the product.
• Designing the UI, in collaboration with the talented Denis Moulin.

Tempo

Tempo is the email client to help you to take back control of your inbox. It aims to do away with the constant stream of interruptions that mess with your work, by allowing you to sort through new mail in batches with focused sorting and smart features.

The product was conceptualized and designed by the talented Founders partners, Sebastian Stockmarr and Stefano Zorzi. I pitched in with some initial product design work on the MVP.