Product Strategy & Acceleration

Based on the Lean Inception framework, this offering bridges the gap between business and technical teams, ensuring alignment, validation, and an actionable product roadmap through an intensive, coached workshop format.

The promise: From concept to backlog in three days.

For best results, invite your business stakeholders or target consumers to be active participants. This increases cohesion and ownership between your Tech, Product and Consumers.

 • 3-day, co-located experiential learning sessions.

• Strong coaching and facilitation throughout.

• Focused business engagement on Days 1 and 3.

• Creation of a working, prioritized product backlog.

• Implementation of a repeatable product framework.

• Validation of core business and product assumptions.

• Establishment of foundational building blocks for successful product delivery.

• Alignment of product goals with business needs.

The digital team of an industrial manufacturing organization lacked confidence that the "requirements" given to it would create a sustainable product that would meet stakeholders needs. The team was allowed 9-months to deliver a product to be used in a production environment, but was concerned that the finished product would not align to the needs of the end user. 

Leadership requested a Lean Product workout, and gathered experts from business functions to participate in a 3-day workout side-by-side with the digital team to understand current state workflow, challenges and potential solutions. 

At the end of the three days, the team had, together, created a working roadmap and backlog. This was all prioritized to core end-user needs.

Ultimately, the team created a working product in just three months and saw 100% adoption of the product at locations, globally. 

Accelerate decision-making and unlock innovation with a structured, high-impact Design Sprint. In just days, your team will align on critical challenges, rapidly prototype solutions, and validate ideas with real consumers. This approach minimizes risk and maximizing speed to execution. 

Whether you're launching a new product, refining a business strategy, or solving a complex problem, the Design Sprint approach delivers actionable insights and a clear path forward.

The promise: Get clarity, alignment, and tangible outcomes—fast.

Inertia can cripple an organizations progress. The Design Sprint is formatted to accelerate learning and break through that inertia. 

 • 4-day, co-located design process.

• Strict timeboxes, coaching and facilitation throughout.

• Focused business engagement on Days 1 and 4.

• Faster decision making, accelerating innovation and business impact. 

• Validated Concept – Rapid prototyping and real user testing provides immediate feedback, reducing uncertainty before full-scale development.

• Actionable Next Steps – A clear roadmap for execution, whether it’s refining the solution, iterating based on feedback, or moving straight to execution.

A team was unsure if investing 6-months in product development would provide the value proposition worthy of the investment. There was significant inertia involved in the decision making process to commit to development, and unable to drive to a definitive decision, leadership engaged in a Design Sprint to break through that inertia.

After spending 1-day on-site with the customer, the team followed the process, keeping the end consumer of the product in mind at all times. At the end of the design sprint a high fidelity prototype was presented to stakeholders for their feedback. 

Although the team had perfectly captured the products core features and presented them accordingly, it was determined that the overall value proposition would not move the needle on critical metrics needed to justify the investment. Leadership decided to cancel the product and focus developer resources on other critical product needs.

By leveraging the Design Sprint system, the leadership, and the development team, were  able to make an informed decision as to their course of action, in just one week, rather than months. 

The appStudio Product Accelerator is a 10-day intensive program designed to align development and product teams, establish agile best practices, and deliver high-quality digital products. 

Though the most demanding offering to implement, it provides the highest value by fostering collaboration, creating debt-free working software, and ensuring tight feedback loops. The appStudio is ideal for teams seeking rigor, focus, and accelerated delivery.

To see how General Electric implemented the appStudio, please see the video below

• 10 working-day, co-located experiential developlement sessions.

• Strict adherence to agile practices.

• Strong coaching to guide the process.

• Creation of a working, debt-free digital product.

• Implementation of a repeatable agile framework.

• Establishment of tight feedback loops between product management, stakeholders, and development teams.

• Adoption of key agile practices, including Definition of Done (DoD), relative story sizing, and more.

• Alignment of product management with development teams.

The appStudio Product Accelerator was implemented at GE's digital foundries, globally. At the New Orleans digital center, a highly visible product was experiencing difficulties scaling. The development team, counting more than 100 members, needed to align on how it operated and shared knowledge throughout. 

As a result, the appStudio was used to kick off that process, and was used to sling shot the teams in their development process thereafter. Please see the link below for a documentary video created during that process. 

https://youtu.be/BiN_OoAyt_w?si=nWB4n1oCWK3apDFx

The appStudio was held up as a model for how product development should be performed at GE, and was scaled throughout the world to great effect.