From no shared direction to a strategy that stuck

The challenge

A global research and analytics organization had just reorganized its product team, and a newly hired VP of Product needed to present the entire department's strategy and plans to the C-suite, fast, to earn buy-in and build credibility. Half the team was new, half had long tenure, and trust was low. There was no clear strategy, shared direction or working processes, so the group pulled in different directions, consumed by tech debt and day-to-day firefighting. Product, engineering, analytics and architecture worked in silos with competing priorities, across the UK, EU, US and India. Decisions were often driven by technical preferences and strong opinions rather than data and customer needs. Leadership was strong in technology, but needed someone to lead the strategy and bring the team together.

Listen and envision

I started with listening and building trust across the teams. I surfaced customer research that had been left on the shelf, and brought the organization's UX team into the process for the first time, giving customer insight a permanent seat at the table.

Design the strategy

I designed and ran four design-thinking workshops that deliberately started with middle managers and practitioners across product, engineering, analytics and architecture, shaping the strategy together before it went to leadership. With a new VP's credibility on the line, a top-down plan would have been faster to write. Building it bottom-up meant leadership would see a strategy the people doing the work already owned. The result was a product team strategy grounded in customer and user needs that laddered directly up to the enterprise strategy. When it was presented, leadership endorsed it unanimously, because the team had built it and the evidence behind it was clear and compelling.

Make it real

• A visually clear strategy deck for the C-suite and cross-functional teams, covering the new vision and mission, what the strategy was and was not, priority market segments and customers, and how those translated into optimized and new products and services.

• A product roadmap and go-to-market strategy, plus visual product concepts that showed what success could look like, so the team could build from concrete examples instead of starting from scratch.

• New processes and tools kept collaboration going after the workshops ended and improved how the strategy was delivered day to day.