Even the most powerful enterprises, with elite engineers, deep pockets, and global reach, often struggle with something far more fundamental than technology: momentum.
We recently had a front-row seat to this challenge during a workshop with the digital leadership team of one of the world’s largest industrial conglomerates. With a $50B footprint and operations across dozens of countries, their goal wasn’t to experiment. It was to ship real innovation faster, leaner, and with measurable value.
The constraints? Familiar to almost anyone trying to drive change in a large organisation:
- Siloed decision-making
- Pilots that gather dust
- Competing definitions of “value”
- Legacy systems stitched together by workarounds
They weren’t short on ideas. They were short on alignment, velocity, and validation.
Author’s Note: We’d love to share more specifics about who this was, but for now, we’re keeping names under wraps due to an active NDA.
Contents
The Challenge: Building a Digital Product Ecosystem Without Losing Control
This enterprise had been developing a set of internal and external software tools for years. Tools they now feel the need to evolve into a unified, SaaS-style platform.
Here’s what they were wrestling with:
- How to standardise platforms across global teams without over-engineering or losing adaptability
- How to define a real MVP, not just an internal pilot
- How to balance speed with risk, without breaking internal security or compliance constraints
- How to avoid “transformation theatre” while still checking all the boxes that leadership needed to see
It wasn’t just a software question. It was a business question, and they looked for an outside perspective to help move things forward.
A workshop with product and software experts to ensure alignment around MVP scope with business and technical stakeholders.
This helped them prioritise based on risk rather than roadmap, and introduced lean delivery structures that allowed their teams to build momentum before bureaucracy caught up.
The Path to Real Innovation: A Strategic Product Workshop
Instead of leading with solutions, space was created for critical questions.
This covered priorities, value, risk, and feasibility. Less about telling them what to build. More was about giving the right people the right tools to figure it out together.
They were able to:
- Align product, technical, and commercial stakeholders around shared outcomes
- Surface internal tensions and unspoken success criteria
- Translate a bold vision into lean, testable product bets
- Prioritise based on risk and unknowns, not political convenience or roadmap defaults
They didn’t need a new methodology. They needed clarity on the blockers holding them back. By surfacing the assumptions slowing progress and creating space for alignment, they unlocked a more focused and confident way to move forward.
Looking to drive innovation with real impact?
Whether you’re validating a new business model, launching an internal venture, or modernising legacy systems, our team of product experts and ex-startup founders will help you move fast, think lean, and build with purpose.
Key Findings: 5 Patterns Holding Innovation Back
Across the session, five core patterns were uncovered that tend to slow corporate innovation. This included:
1. MVP ≠ Pilot
Too often, internal teams treat a quick prototype or internal showcase as a minimum viable product. But a real MVP means putting something usable in the hands of your actual target users and measuring real behavior. If you’re not gathering external feedback, you’re not learning what the market needs — you’re just validating internal bias.
A team shifts from internal demos to building a lean prototype and testing it with a small group of real users.
The goal changes from getting stakeholder approval to uncovering friction in the actual user journey.
2. Too Many Pilots, Not Enough Learning
Enterprise environments tend to default to running multiple pilots across business units.
But without a clear hypothesis, success metrics, or connection to long-term strategy, these pilots become busywork.
What’s missing isn’t effort, it’s synthesis. One well-structured experiment can tell you more than five disconnected ones.
Teams adopt a shared experiment framework to document goals, assumptions, and results.
Leadership gains visibility into what’s being tested and why, enabling pattern recognition, prioritisation, and faster decision-making.
3. Platform Paralysis
The intention to “build a platform” is noble, but it often becomes a trap. Large orgs over-architect from day one, trying to cover every use case. The result is months (or years) of planning before value is delivered. The better route? Build modularly. Start small. Validate a use case, then scale from strength.
4. Innovation Theatre
Digital transformation becomes an internal branding exercise. Fancy roadmaps, grand vision decks, and polished internal demos get more attention than the actual user problems being solved. If the primary goal becomes looking innovative rather than delivering innovation, progress stalls fast.
5. Stakeholder Sprawl
It’s not uncommon for corporate initiatives to involve architecture, security, compliance, legal, operations, product, and commercial – all at once. But without a shared success metric and aligned cadence, decision velocity drops. Innovation doesn’t die because of bad ideas; it dies from indecision.
We helped surface conflicting objectives early, like one team optimising for scalability, another for speed, and another for stakeholder optics.
We then anchored the conversation in shared, measurable success criteria to move forward without delay.
What You Can Take Away and Apply to Your Enterprise Team
If you’re facing similar challenges, here’s how you can take practical, proven steps to shift from theory to traction:
1. Start Small & Test Fast
Choose one core assumption behind your idea and test it in isolation. Build a no-code prototype or interactive wireframe using tools like Webflow or Figma. Test it with five real users. Focus on actions, not opinions — observe how they interact, where they hesitate, and what they ignore.
2. Turn Product Scope Into a Strategic Conversation
Don’t start with requirements — start with value. Host a product scoping workshop with stakeholders across product, tech, and business. Use tools like service blueprints or impact-effort matrices to surface and cut non-essential ideas. Agree upfront on what success looks like, and revisit scope weekly as new insights surface.
3. Identify Your Riskiest Assumptions First
Every product idea depends on 3–5 high-risk assumptions. Map them using a lean canvas or risk prioritization grid. Then design micro-experiments to test the riskiest ones early. For instance: before building a feature, try to pre-sell it or run an A/B test with non-functional CTAs.
4. Redesign Your Pilot Process as an Experiment Loop
Replace “pilot” with “hypothesis.” For each new initiative, document: what are we testing, how will we measure it, and what will we do with the result? Post-mortem every pilot the same way you would a product launch. Decide: kill, pivot, or scale.
5. Shift Your Feedback Culture From Ask to Observe
Stop asking people what they want. Give them a product and watch what they do. Use moderated usability sessions, in-product analytics, and tools like FullStory or Maze to collect real behavior data. Insight grows when observation replaces assumption.
6. Structure Your Team Like a Startup Squad
Create lean, empowered teams with a single product owner, a dedicated designer, and engineers who can ship fast. Limit team size to 5–7 people. Give them a mission and trust them to own it end-to-end. Don’t route decisions through layers of governance.
7. Work With Partners Who Accelerate Thinking
Bring in external teams not just to build, but to challenge, coach, and co-create. Start with a product scope sprint or a lean pilot to test fit. Look for partners who ask hard questions, push your thinking, and teach your team — not just code on command.
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Final Thought: You Don’t Have to Be a Startup, But You Do Need to Think Like One
This organisation didn’t need disruption. They needed space. Space to reframe the way they defined success, challenged assumptions, and made decisions as a team. What changed wasn’t their structure. It was their rhythm.
By shifting the conversation from outputs to outcomes, and by embedding product thinking into the way strategy, design, and tech came together, they found a faster way to move forward.
If you’re navigating similar friction inside your team, ask yourself:
- Are we learning from real users or just validating internal beliefs?
- Do we have a shared understanding of what success looks like?
- Are we shipping small, valuable pieces fast enough to adapt and learn?
If the answer isn’t a confident yes, it might be time to focus less on transformation—and more on traction.
