Over the last years many industries have seen what was once strong core offerings devolve into minimum requirements from customers. One of the industries affected by this is the office property market, where customer expectations have moved from just sustainable, quality office spaces at the right location, to the necessary tools and services that will help the customers reach their business goals. PropTech, digital services, IoT and other buzzwords have hence infiltrated the industry – but few fill these words with services that create real value.

🤔 The challenge

The need for quality services among large corporations and their employees remains. Changes happen faster than ever, due to factors such as business cycle fluctuations, generational changes, increased competition and technology changing the way people work. In order to keep up with these changes, companies are in need of new tools and services that can help them reach their business goals.

In order to keep up with these expectations, Entra ASA – a leading owner, manager and developer of office properties in Norway – wanted to explore how they could increase the value they provide to the end-user. While Entra has been paving the way in the industry with cutting edge projects such as Powerhouse and Rebel, they now wanted to create more value – not only for the companies renting office spaces – but also for the people spending eight hours or more Monday to Friday in their buildings.

💪 Our approach

To minimize risk and maximize speed, we split the project into three phases. Each of these phases had clearly defined goals and KPI’s that would decide whether we moved on to a new stage or not, allowing us to move quickly while making sure we were on the right track from both a business and end-user perspective. 

Defining a business opportunity in 4 weeks
We ran a 4 week sprint aiming to explore the business opportunities with end-users. By mapping out the workdays of employees working for large corporations, we identified a variety of undiscovered pain points. Considering the resources, knowledge and market position Entra has in hand, and where we saw business value, we decided to dive into knowledge sharing as a pain point.

Creating and validating a business concept in 6 weeks
We spent 6 weeks defining the pain points, creating a concept covering the needs, and validating it with users. We spoke further with employees and business managers, digging deeper into the actual pains on the learning journey. Over the course of 6 weeks, we continuously worked on improving steps in that journey by rapidly testing and validating various prototypes in several different ways.

Piloting with real users over 12 weeks
We spent 4 weeks building the first functional MVP, which we piloted for 8 weeks with Entra’s employees and with a department at one of the world’s leading companies for remote collaboration. After seeing satisfying usage and retention numbers over time, we were confident that we were getting close to a market-ready service.

🙌 The results

During a net 6 months of work, we went from a blank canvas to a commercial launch of the first version of a service developed together with Entra and their customers. Teamskill, a knowledge-sharing platform for large corporations, is now in its commercialization stage aiming to roll out to some of Norway’s largest knowledge-driven companies. With Entra having a mission of creating the «offices where the most happy employees work», it came as a natural step to contribute to their personal and professional growth – ultimately helping both Entra and their customers reach their business goals.