With over 30 years of experience running a strategy consultancy, founder Janice St Clair wanted to revolutionise the way global pharmaceutical brands develop their strategies to bring life-saving drugs and therapies to patients.

All too often, teams worked in silos - across countries and time-zones - resulting in strategies that were missing crucial perspectives. Developing a strategy was also a lengthy, manual process. With tens of PowerPoints being created, it was all too common for files to be lost or decisions to have little traceability.

Janice came to Neverbland with a clear understanding of the problem, but needed a partner to design the best digital solution.

We needed to develop a decision-making tool for global pharmaceutical teams who have members based all around the world, to enable them to share and refine their ideas in one centralised place.

The tool needed to be interactive - allowing multiple users to live input, edit and collaborate at the same time.

It was also necessary to build different layers of permissions for different user types, to allow senior team members to make decisions at each stage of the strategy process.

NMBLR takes a disruptive approach to creating pharmaceutical strategies, so we anchored its brand around innovation.

The name NMBLR encapsulates the value for users; a nimble alternative to a process that has traditionally been manual and convoluted. We arrived at a visual style that was appropriate for a business audience, but infused it with bright colours and delightful interactions.

Nmblr is unique tool, so we know it wouldn’t look like any existing product out there. Our approach was inspired by other digital whiteboards and collaboration tools, whilst taking a deep dive to discover the elements that make online collaboration effective and enjoyable.

By testing clickable prototypes with real prospective users, we were able to find the design which best solved their problems.

The result was a digital tool that acts as a framework for guided collaboration. We combined familiar patterns, like drag-and-drop sticky notes to brainstorm, with completely new ways of synthesising ideas into a single strategy.

With the insight that strategies often take months or years to develop, we created a homepage with a progress overview for teams to see their progress and dive back in to any section.

We used web sockets and a temporary data storage solution, Redis, to handle the server load when multiple users are collaborating at the same time.

Knowing users might be based all over the world, we needed NMBLR to work well for users who might have slow internet speeds. We used Apollo Cache to predict the server’s response, and keep pages reactive for everyone.

Being the first to solve these problems for global pharmaceutical teams, NMBLR was recognised by Health World Tech as one of the World’s Top 50 Innovators of 2022. We’re continuing to work with the team to deliver new features and updates as more people use the product.