Closing the last chapter and opening the door for the next.

In September of this year I left MOBGEN (Accenture Interactive) to take on a new role as Product Manager at NewMotion. Leaving MOBGEN meant saying goodbye to many great colleagues and friends, and leaving behind a fantastic product that I had spent a great deal of time and effort on.

That product was Enso, a unique app for managing design sprints, that I had been involved in for over two years. In fact, my work on Enso, alongside a brilliant and dedicated team, was something that helped me move forward in my career. That’s why it’s important to me that I take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to everyone who worked with me on Enso, including the teams in the Netherlands (Amsterdam) and in Costa Rica (Heredia).

The Enso project grew from a desire to demonstrate the knowledge gained from running a design sprint for a client. At the time, there was no available product that was flexible enough to plan a workshop and a library of activities specifically aimed for design sprints. Enso was aimed for people who wanted to run design workshops, for both newcomers to the design sprint discipline and for experienced facilitators.

Product development began with a small team in Amsterdam, and we put together a prototype followed by an MVP before gaining internal investment from within Accenture Interactive. After several months of work, the product reached a point that needed a fully dedicated team in order to achieve the goals set following the internal investment. The Amsterdam team started working with another subsidiary of Accenture Interactive, Fjord. This partnership led to the creation of a dedicated team in Heredia (Costa Rica) and the new design and development colleagues brought additional insight and enthusiasm to the Enso product.

The two cooperating teams spent several months creating a commercial release, which was first promoted internally and later released to clients. Following that first release we spent several months more improving the product and adding new features to help our facilitators.

Working on Enso was a great experience, which was both challenging and exciting. I want to thank all the fantastic colleagues who helped get Enso off the ground and launch it within Accenture Interactive. I hope everyone involved found the experience as worthwhile as I did.

You can read more about how we reached the first MVP [here & here] and how we decided on the product name [here]