NOS Portugal — Design Sprint and Problem Framing Training for Customer Insights and Employer Branding
The teams that should be doing this most
Most Design Sprint and Problem Framing training goes to product teams, IT teams, or innovation functions. That makes sense — these are the teams with a direct mandate to build things and solve problems, and the methods slot naturally into their workflow.
But there's a category of team for whom the methods are arguably even more directly relevant, and who are often overlooked in these conversations: the teams whose entire function is understanding people.
Customer Insights teams spend their working lives generating and interpreting data about what customers experience, what they need, and what they're not getting. Employer Branding teams do the same for a different audience — candidates and employees — translating complex organizational culture into propositions that attract and retain talent.
Both functions are excellent at the upstream work: gathering evidence, surfacing patterns, identifying gaps. What they often lack is a structured methodology for the downstream step — for converting that understanding into a precisely defined problem and a tested solution direction. Research without a structured problem definition process produces insights that accumulate but don't easily become action. Employer Branding without a structured way to define what problem a campaign or initiative is actually solving produces activity that's hard to evaluate and harder to iterate.
This is what NOS recognized when they brought both teams together for three days of Design Sprint and Problem Framing training in Lisbon in October 2024.
NOS and the context that makes this investment specific
NOS is one of Portugal's largest telecommunications companies, operating across mobile, internet, and television services in a competitive market where customer experience is a primary differentiator and talent is increasingly contested. For NOS, the question of how to stay close to what customers actually need — and how to attract the people who can deliver it — isn't abstract. It's the operational reality that the Customer Insights and Employer Branding teams navigate every day.
Bringing these two teams together for the same training program was a deliberate decision. Both functions deal in audience understanding. Both need to translate complex, multi-signal pictures of a person or group into something specific enough to act on. And both can use the same structured methodology to do it — even though their audiences, their data, and their deliverables look different.
The training gave both teams a shared language and a shared process. That cross-functional common ground has its own value beyond what each team produces independently: when Customer Insights and Employer Branding share a methodology for defining problems and testing solutions, the conversations between them become more productive, and the organization's overall capability to act on what it knows improves.
What the three days covered
The program opened with Problem Framing — the discipline of defining the right problem before any solution work begins.
For Customer Insights teams, this is where the methodology lands with particular force. Insights professionals are skilled at generating evidence about what customers experience. The gap is often the step between evidence and problem statement: translating "customers are dissatisfied with X" or "usage data shows a drop in Y" into a specific, stakeholder-agreed definition of what problem is actually worth solving. Without that translation, insights inform conversations but don't reliably drive decisions. Problem Framing closes that gap — giving the team a structured process to move from data to defined problem to aligned action.
For Employer Branding teams, the same logic applies to a different audience. Employer branding work typically starts with a question about how the organization is perceived by candidates or employees — and quickly encounters the challenge of translating complex, sometimes contradictory perception data into a problem statement specific enough to guide a campaign, a message, or an initiative. Problem Framing creates the structured process for that translation: surfacing the assumptions embedded in the current approach, aligning stakeholders on what the actual challenge is, and producing a problem statement that is testable rather than merely directional.
Design Sprint training moved both teams through the complete sprint arc: mapping the challenge, generating ideas individually before sharing them with the group, converging on a direction, building a prototype, and testing it with real people.
For Customer Insights, the prototype-and-test loop is a specific capability addition. Insights teams are expert at research — at gathering evidence about what exists. Design Sprints add the capacity to test what could exist: to build a representation of a potential solution and put it in front of real customers before committing to developing it. That's a different skill from research, and a genuinely complementary one. An insights team that can both research existing conditions and test proposed solutions is a more complete problem-solving partner for the business.
For Employer Branding, the Design Sprint's individual-before-group ideation structure is especially valuable. Employer Branding teams often operate in environments where a few strong opinions — usually from senior leadership about how the organization wants to present itself — dominate the creative direction before the team has had space to generate a genuinely diverse range of options. The Together Alone principle creates structural protection for that diversity: every participant develops their thinking independently before anything is shared, which means the strongest idea — not the loudest voice — is more likely to shape the direction.
Across both teams, the sprint's emphasis on desirability testing — on finding out whether real people actually respond to a proposed solution before significant resources are committed — connects directly to both teams' core mandate: understanding what people actually want, not what the organization assumes they want.
What a unified team brings to the training
The original quote that described the NOS teams during the training — "the front of the jersey is more important than the back" — points to something that's genuinely relevant beyond team spirit.
Design Sprint and Problem Framing training works best when the people in the room are oriented toward a shared goal rather than individual performance. The methods are fundamentally collaborative: Together Alone produces better collective output precisely because individual thinking feeds into group synthesis rather than competing with it. The Decider role is most effective when everyone in the room understands that the decision serves the sprint's goal, not their personal agenda. The prototype-and-test loop produces more useful learning when the team is genuinely curious about what customers say rather than invested in confirming what they've already decided.
Teams that bring genuine collaborative instinct to the training — where the collective output is the point, not personal credit — tend to get more out of the methods faster. The NOS teams' orientation toward collective over individual is the cultural condition that makes the training's collaborative structure feel natural rather than imposed.
Why telecoms teams need this capability now
Telecommunications is a sector under sustained competitive pressure. Digital challengers, converging technologies, and increasingly demanding customers are creating an environment where the gap between what a telco says it offers and what customers actually experience is both more visible and more consequential than it was a decade ago.
For Customer Insights teams at a telco like NOS, this means the demand for faster, more actionable insight has intensified. It's no longer enough to produce a quarterly research report. The business needs insights functions that can define specific problems worth solving, rapidly test potential directions, and feed validated findings into product and service development in timeframes that match how fast the competitive environment is moving.
For Employer Branding teams, the talent competition in technology and telecommunications has made the employer value proposition a genuine strategic asset rather than a communications exercise. Attracting and retaining people with digital, data, and engineering skills — in a market where those skills are competed for by technology companies with stronger brand recognition — requires the same precision in problem definition and solution testing that customer-facing teams apply to product development.
Design Sprint and Problem Framing training gives both functions the methodology to operate at that pace and precision. Not just to understand their audiences better — they already do that — but to convert that understanding into defined problems and tested directions more efficiently.
