Set up a discovery lab to drive customer centric product innovation
Brands worth reaching for.
Constellation Brands is the fastest-growing, beers, wines & spirits company in the U.S, with iconic brands, including Corona Extra and Modelo Especial.
The Challenge
Constellation Brands had issues with digital innovation due to unempowered teams, a project mindset and a lack of customer insight.
As part of this wider transformation, I set up and led a cross-functional discovery lab to embed led insight and hypothesis driven design.
The Process
- Pitched the discovery lab to product and sales leadership to secure buy in for a cross-functional team for the lab.
- With leadership, selected an app as a focus area for the discovery lab.
- Defined the discovery lab team, including sales and product representation from constellation and design, research and data consultants for a suitable skills mix for success.
- Educated the team on continuous discovery habits, design thinking and hypothesis driven design
- Created a customer engagement strategy for weekly customer interaction.
- Created a vision board and OKRs for the app
- Interviews with sales team members to map out the end to end annual sales process and understand customer needs
- Developed a fist draft prototype based on sales team insights
- Conducted weekly customer research to test 140 hypotheses over 2 months.
The Outcome
The discovery lab was a great introduction to key design thinking approaches that have been adopted by Constellation
Introduced a cross functional team to key design thinking and continuous discovery concepts.
Based on this discovery work, the app moved on to build and is now live with customers.
Since this engagement, Constellation have continued on their product centric journey and customer insight is now a foundational part of their product approach across product teams.
Jason Burin
Product Manager - Constellation Brands
I worked with Simon over 9 months as part of a Product Centric transformation that Simon was leading with his team. We focussed on establishing a discovery lab for continuous discovery. A couple key themes that Simon coached the team on:
1. The importance of product discovery and talking with customers to gain a deep understanding of the problems/challenges they face
2. Creating prototypes and testing them with customers… then keep iterating as part of the design loop with a focus on outcomes
3. Always bring your Engineers along on the journey as they often will provide the very best solutions
As I’ve grown in my career Simon’s coaching was and remains invaluable. Moreover, he cares much more about people over process and genuinely is a great great individual. The world of Product needs more people like Simon to help lead the way
Key takeaways
The challenge with this engagement was starting from a low base understanding of design thinking and customer centricity in the Constellation team. The discovery lab was equal parts delivery and education. What worked really well was education by doing... working hands-on to bring to life continuous discovery habits with ongoing coaching is the best way to learn.
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