Meralco partnered with On-Off Group to explore how Design Sprints could accelerate product innovation. The goal was ambitious: create, prototype, and test a new digital app concept in just one week — while building the team’s confidence in using design-led methods for future challenges.

The Challenge

As the Philippines’ largest utility provider, Meralco wanted to improve the way customers track energy usage and manage costs. The team faced several hurdles:

• Electricity usage data was hard for customers to access and interpret.
• Traditional product development was slow, with limited user testing upfront.
• Cross-functional collaboration was difficult across departments.

Leadership needed a fast, structured approach to cut through complexity and generate a validated concept that could move toward implementation.

The Solution

On-Off Group facilitated a 5-day Design Sprint with a cross-functional Meralco team. Using a combination of Design Thinking and UX methods, the team moved from challenge definition to high-fidelity prototype, with real customer feedback guiding each step.

• Understand – Expert interviews and journey mapping uncovered customer pain points and aligned the team around a Sprint Goal.
• Diverge – Rapid ideation and sketching generated a wide range of creative solutions without judgment.
• Converge – Heat map voting and a Decider process selected the strongest ideas, refined into a storyboard for prototyping.
• Prototype – A functional, high-fidelity app prototype was built in just one day using Marvel.
• Test – Ten real customers interacted with the prototype, providing direct feedback that shaped future iterations.

The process not only delivered a working prototype, but also showed Meralco how structured collaboration and user testing could accelerate innovation across the business.

The Results

• Validated concept – Customers loved the idea of real-time usage notifications and found the app’s budgeting tools easy to use.
• Behavioral impact – Users reported they would likely change habits to save energy if they had this data at their fingertips.
• Team capability – Meralco’s sprint team gained first-hand experience in design-led innovation, helping embed these practices internally.

“This Sprint proved that rapid, customer-centric innovation is possible at Meralco.” – Sprint Team Member