success stories and use cases
Facing Tough Challenges? See How Spark + Forge Can Help You Thrive
We’ve unlocked creative potential for many teams and companies, here’s a few stories and examples of how you can create a spark and forge ahead.
“IS it for ME?”
From Roadblocks to Results: Success Stories and Solutions Across Roles
For Founders: Scaling Smartly Amid Complex Growth
The challenge
A tech founder is experiencing rapid growth, but as the team expands, communication gaps and misalignment are starting to slow things down. They feel stuck, unsure how to scale effectively without losing the agility that made their startup successful in the first place.
How Spark + Forge Helps:
Through tailored workshops and tools, Spark + Forge helps the founder implement systems for cross-functional collaboration and structured problem-solving, ensuring that as the company grows, teams remain aligned, motivated, and ready to tackle new challenges without sacrificing speed.
For Sales Directors: Elevating Sales Through Customer-Centric Design Thinking
The challenge
A Sales Director at a B2B tech company is looking for ways to deepen their team’s understanding of customer needs, beyond the usual pitch-based approach. They’ve noticed deals stalling midway through the cycle and suspect it’s due to a lack of real customer engagement and alignment. They want their team to move from a transactional approach to one that builds customer commitment and value at each stage.
How Spark + Forge Helps:
Through a Design Thinking workshop, Spark + Forge equips the sales team with empathy mapping, challenge reframing, and co-creation techniques. This enables the team to deeply understand customer needs and align interactions with their priorities. Involving customers at each stage builds trust, fosters engagement, and strengthens relationships, accelerating deal cycles and driving success.
For Team Leaders: Inspiring and Aligning a Diverse Team
The challenge
A team leader oversees a group with varied skill sets and perspectives. Despite everyone’s talent, they struggle with consistent collaboration, and projects are often delayed by conflicting approaches and unclear priorities.
How Spark + Forge Helps:
We provide team alignment workshops that introduce creative problem-solving techniques, helping the leader bring the team together under shared goals and foster a collaborative culture. With practical tools and exercises, the team learns to leverage each other’s strengths, ensuring everyone is engaged, aligned, and contributing effectively.
For Product Managers: Aligning Product Development with Real Customer Needs
The challenge
A Product Manager at a fast-growing software company finds that product features are often built based on internal assumptions rather than real user input. Despite the team’s best efforts, products sometimes miss the mark, leading to lower-than-expected adoption rates and costly post-launch adjustments.
How Spark + Forge Helps:
Spark + Forge introduces Design Thinking methods that place customers at the heart of product development. Through empathy mapping, rapid prototyping, and iterative feedback loops, we help product teams refine their approach to better understand user needs and co-create with them. This shift ensures that each feature addresses real pain points, reducing development waste and increasing product adoption and satisfaction.
Companies are increasingly valuing creative problem solving skills as a core skill
Find out more
For HR Professionals: Building an Engaged Workforce
The challenge
An HR leader wants to make creativity part of the company’s DNA, but employees feel boxed in by routine processes and uninspired by their work environment. They’re struggling to shift the mindset and build a culture that values creative thinking.
How Spark + Forge Helps:
Spark + Forge offers culture-building programs that equip HR leaders with practical strategies for embedding creativity into daily practices. With hands-on coaching, training sessions, and tools for continuous engagement, Spark + Forge helps create an environment where employees feel empowered to think creatively, boosting engagement and retention.
For Operations Directors: Streamlining Processes with Systems Thinking
The challenge
An Operations Director in a logistics company is facing issues with bottlenecks and inefficiencies across multiple departments. Despite attempts to solve these issues, the fixes are often temporary, and new problems arise due to interdependencies that weren’t fully considered.
How Spark + Forge Helps:
Spark + Forge uses Systems Thinking workshops to help the operations team map out their processes, identify key interdependencies, and address root causes instead of surface-level symptoms. By visualising the workflow and understanding how changes in one area affect others, the team gains clarity on how to streamline processes sustainably, improving efficiency and reducing friction between departments.
A few success stories
CREATIVity Training and culture
Challenge: Daemon wanted a fresh approach to problem-solving and innovation that could keep pace with rapidly changing client needs and complex tech environments.
Solution: Embedding Design Thinking and creative problem-solving into Daemon’s core practices, building a toolkit that turned big ideas into actionable insights. Through hands-on workshops and coaching, team members learned to tackle problems creatively, identify root causes, and prototype impactful solutions quickly.
Results: This shift sparked new ways of thinking across teams, leading to faster, more effective problem-solving. It empowered Daemon to exceed client expectations, providing high-value solutions with a creative edge that became a competitive differentiator.
Takeaway: When creativity meets structure, it transforms potential into real-world impact. Spark + Forge equipped Daemon not only to keep up but to lead in an evolving industry.
COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING and idea generation
Case Study: Building PuppyPal’s Brand and Business Model with a Human-Centered Approach
Client: PuppyPal, a startup for responsible dog ownership
Challenge: PuppyPal needed a clear business model and brand identity that resonated with dog owners and built a loyal community, but they were unsure where to start.
Solution: Spark + Forge introduced a lean, human-centered approach that focused on understanding PuppyPal’s users first. Through collaborative sessions, we helped define their core offering, create a relatable brand identity, and shape a business model that could grow with their vision. The process included creative thinking techniques that put the needs and aspirations of dog owners front and center.
Results: PuppyPal emerged with a focused, community-oriented brand and a business model tailored to their users’ needs, laying the foundation for strong, sustainable growth.
Takeaway: By starting with empathy and creativity, Spark + Forge helped PuppyPal build a brand that speaks to its audience, creating genuine connections from the ground up.
design thinking IMPACT
Case Study: Enhancing Creative Problem-Solving for Agilysys’ EMEA Sales Team
Client: Agilysys, a leading hospitality software provider
Challenge: The Agilysys EMEA sales team needed practical problem-solving tools to address recurring challenges, generate new ideas, and strengthen their consultative sales approach.
Solution: Facilitation of a one-day workshop with 16 team members, using a structured agenda designed to spark ideation, retrospection, and action planning. Through activities like the Sailboat Retrospective, “How Might We” statements, and prototyping exercises, the team uncovered pressing issues, reframed challenges as opportunities, and developed actionable ideas.
Results:
• Over 60 new ideas generated and prioritized
• Action plans initiated for four key ideas to test
• Empathy and insight into team strengths and areas for improvement
• A visual story ‘poster’ capturing insights and promoting skill-sharing
Takeaway: By creating a safe, creative space for reflection and innovation, We equipped Agilysys’ sales team with problem-solving techniques and design thinking tools tailored to their needs, fueling optimism and readiness for action.
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