MuchSkills (Up Strategy Lab's own venture)

No client. No brief. Just a problem Noel kept running into.

We built MuchSkills ourselves, from a colour-coded spreadsheet to a Red Dot Award-winning skills intelligence platform now used by teams worldwide.

More work

Client: MuchSkills (Up Strategy Lab's own venture)
Deliverables: Brand System
Digital Product Design
Website
SEO Strategy
Our expertise: We designed and built this one ourselves, from business case to Red Dot Award-winning product to global platform.
Duration: 5+ years, ongoing
View site: Visit the site, opens in a new window

The challenge

Across the organisations Noel and Daniel had worked with, the same problem kept resurfacing: nobody had a reliable answer to who could actually do what. CVs were filed away the moment someone was hired and rarely looked at again. Performance reviews stayed confidential, which meant the skills discussed in them never made it back into anyone else’s hands. Institutional knowledge, who was capable of what, and who wanted to grow into what, lived scattered across managers’ memories rather than anywhere anyone could search.

The result was familiar: miscommunication, unbalanced workloads, and talent decisions made on assumption rather than evidence. There was no client asking us to solve it. So we built the answer ourselves.

What we did

A visual, intuitive skills intelligence platform that makes the invisible visible.

Research into how organisations actually manage skills shaped the core concept from the start. From there, everything else was built.

Product strategy and concept
We researched how organisations actually manage skills today, and used that to define the core concept: a visual, intuitive skills intelligence platform that makes the invisible visible.
UX and product design
The product needed to balance real complexity with real clarity. We designed visual skills maps, intuitive input flows, and leader-focused dashboards, built around lightweight, human-centred interactions.
Brand and identity
We built a visual identity that balances warmth and credibility across a genuinely broad audience, HR teams, compliance leaders, consultancies, and regulated industries, described internally as clean, distinctive, and quietly playful.
Build and launch
We built the full product ourselves on a bootstrapped budget: web app, mobile experience, and integrations, alongside the go-to-market strategy covering positioning, messaging, pricing, and channel approach.
Continuous product development
Development has not stopped. Features including CV Inventory, compliance tracking, resource management, and API integrations now serve HR and L&D leaders, consulting firms, compliance teams, and tech organisations globally.

The outcome

More than a product, MuchSkills is proof of how Up Strategy Lab works.

MuchSkills is now used by teams across global consulting firms, universities, industrial companies, and technology organisations. It has been recognised as a Major Contender in Everest Group’s PEAK Matrix 2026, and won a Red Dot Design Award for product design. On independent software review platforms, it holds a 5.0 rating on Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice, and a 4.5 rating on G2.

When we say we think like founders, this is what we mean.

The work