Dear friends, partners, collaborators, and community,
This July 2025, we proudly mark a decade of The Collab Folks — a journey rooted in the spirit of collaboration, growth, and creative play.
🌟 Our Journey at a Glance
From the beginning, we’ve ventured into coaching product teams across Southeast Asia—guiding agile transitions, product development, and UX maturity with heart and purpose.
Over the years, we’ve:
- Welcomed diverse voices into our internal learning dojo, experimenting with ways to learn how to learn—starting in 2022 with invited guests and community play.
- Introduced #COWTOPIA, our signature game-based learning experience, and scaled it for clients and public sessions throughout 2021 and into 2022.
- Curated community events like [Un]masterclass, deep-diving into topics like “Failing OKR” and “Failing Design” with facilitated retrospectives in early 2022.
🤝 Partner Collaborations & Client Work
Our impact is grounded in meaningful relationships with clients and partners who have trusted us to walk with them in transformation:
- From fintech and public service to retail and digital products, we partnered with teams to create common language and shared practices around agility and UX maturity.
- Our partners—Tze Chin Tang, Andre Tan, Michael Ong, and Mulyadi Oey—co-facilitated learning adventures, co-creating grounded experiences to grow teams in ways that matter.
🌱 Reflecting on Key Learnings
- Play unlocks deeper learning. Whether through Cowtopia or dojo formats, playful experimentation has been our entryway into serious learning.
- Learning is collective. Our dojo is not just a program—it’s a platform to practice, reflect, and adapt together, year after year.
- Failure holds insight. Through the [Un]masterclass series, we embraced failure—not as a setback but as a design lens for growth and learning.
🚀 Looking Forward
As we step into our second decade, our guiding aspiration is to deepen presence, connection, and impact:
- Expand our collaborative learning footprint—growing Cowtopia, dojo series, and community events across Southeast Asia.
- Lead more intentional experiments at the intersection of somatics, neuroscience, and organizational development.
- Continue to nurture spaces where teams can intentionally play, reflect, and evolve—together.
On behalf of the entire Collab Folks collective, thank you for walking with us. Whether you’ve shown up as a learner, partner, co-facilitator, or friend—you are part of our story.
Here’s to the next chapter of co-created curiosity, insight, and play.
Warmly,
Michael Ong & The Collab Folks Collective
July 2025
The Collab Folks 