A design sprint only runs as well as the person facilitating it. Bayer had a handful of those people, in a handful of cities. We built a system so any team could run one without waiting for that person to be free.
How might we democratize innovation sprints across a global enterprise?
Bayer's innovation practice was expensive to run, geographically concentrated, and dependent on a small pool of trained facilitators. Sprint knowledge lived in that facilitator's head and evaporated the moment the session ended. We were brought in to change the system underneath it, not just design another workshop template.
Innovation was fragmented across divisions, each operating in isolation. Ownership needed to move from individual facilitators to a shared structure any team could plug into.
Sprint methodology lived in a handful of regional hubs, which kept global teams from running sessions on their own. Scaling meant transferring facilitator judgment into a system, not just a manual.
What we heard from Bayer's teams.
Research combined stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, and analysis of past sprint artifacts with Bayer's innovation leads, product owners, and facilitators across the organization's global divisions. Four insight clusters emerged, and became the direct architecture of the system we built.
Bayer didn't need more facilitators.
It needed facilitation to stop depending on specific people.
Every gap traced back to the same root: sprint knowledge lived in individuals, not in the organization.
Synthesis. Every quote mapped to a theme, then traced into an opportunity area.
Observations to insights. Field notes pushed through themes until each produced a claim we could design against.
Opportunity areas. Six framed opportunities, each plotted for impact against ability to execute.
Click any board to view it full size.
One ecosystem. Three connected tools.
Each tool answers one of the four insight clusters above. The three aren't separate products. They're a loop: the Memory Library surfaces past cases to the Enablement Hub, the Hub holds shared quality standards with the Navigator, and the Navigator feeds new insights back into the Library. Knowledge from one sprint becomes the starting condition for the next.
The connective tissue. Each tool is only useful because of what the other two send it. Remove any one and the loop stops compounding.
Designed with Bayer's teams, not for them.
We ran co-creation workshops and multiple rounds of testing with Bayer's innovation leads, product owners, and facilitators. Concepts were rapidly prototyped and tested in real sprint contexts before we committed to high fidelity, then presented to Bayer's innovation leadership team.
Co-creation workshop. Where the three tools got their names. "Sprint Memory Library" and "Sprint Navigator" are both visible here as index cards, before either had a screen.
The team. A four-person design consultant team working through printed sprint concepts between testing rounds.
Working canvas. Parallel concept tracks, testing plans, and the people-process-technology model that shaped the final architecture.
Client deliverable. The final consulting report taking Bayer from research findings through to the three-capability ecosystem and an implementation roadmap.
Interviewed and observed Bayer stakeholders to map where the sprint practice was breaking down.
Synthesized findings into four insight clusters and reframed the brief around systems, not people.
Co-created the three-tool ecosystem with Bayer's teams across two workshops and iterative rounds.
Delivered high-fidelity prototypes for all three tools and presented them to Bayer's leadership team.