upReach, a social mobility charity supporting underrepresented students into graduate careers, was looking to accelerate the delivery of its digital transformation strategy. With Product, Programmes, and Data teams each focused on individual priorities, the transformation project was an opportunity to create greater cross-team alignment to maximise impact. They wanted to sharpen their shared purpose, identify high-value opportunities for the coming academic year, and develop a forward-looking vision for their Senior Leadership Team and Board of Trustees.

Helping unlock the power of digital transformation

From May to September 2025, Unthinkable acted as facilitators, coaches, and product experts — encouraging open collaboration, stimulating new thinking, and drawing out institutional knowledge and individual perspectives. Through a series of team interviews and workshops, grounded in proven product techniques and frameworks, we helped the teams to:

Build a common understanding of their shared purpose and success metrics.
Map the student journey to identify friction points and opportunities.
Generate a wide range of ideas, balancing quick wins with bold bets.
Evaluate opportunities using impact/effort analysis, creating a clear set of priorities.

We also explored ways of working, and identified concrete actions to ensure that cross-functional collaboration continued after our engagement came to an end.

Finally, we led a design sprint to create personas, future-state narratives and interface mock-ups, using a ‘design futures’ approach to encourage the team to think beyond immediate fixes and explore what it would look like to effectively use data, technology and AI in new ways to serve the Gen Alpha students of tomorrow.

The process delivered both immediate and strategic impact. The Product, Programmes, and Data teams are now aligned on a shared purpose, with practical next steps and stronger ways of working together. At a strategic level, the work secured Board approval for a transformative technology initiative — focused on student communication and management — that will shape upReach’s ability to scale.

By combining facilitation with product expertise, we helped upReach work through today’s challenges and also to consider how to future-proof their model, ensuring their technology, data frameworks, and mindset can adapt to deliver impact for years to come.

The Unthinkable Team are exceptional strategic and product thinkers. They immersed themselves in the problems we were trying to solve and acted as insightful facilitators and sounding boards, helping us shape a clearer, more ambitious direction for our digital transformation.

Ged Scheuber, Head of Product