Supply chain innovation across 5,000 restaurants
After several failed attempts at their own customer-centered product discovery, Papa John's brought us in to clarify a critical supply chain problem their nationwide stores faced. We helped to reframe the opportunity, validate new ideas, and drive cross-functional buy-in on what the company would take to market.
Challenges and solutions
Papa John's Product and Design leaders had previously attempted to run some design thinking workshops. When they failed to produce insights and outcomes, the team was left demotivated and misaligned. When we arrived the stakes were high, with senior leaders expecting some wins.
Design Thinking had previously failed
Design Thinking without structure and intention left their team feeling wary and demotivated.
Team-building kickoff and alignment
Before any workshops and brainstorming, we captured each team member's goals and expectations. Then we brought them together to recommit.
Enterprise innovation was slow and siloed
As a publicly traded $4.5B company, being agile and getting buy-in across many leaders and orgs was difficult.
Rapid, cross-functional sprints
With lots of upfront coordination, we assembled a diverse sprint team and led them through rapid rounds of research, discovery, and ideation.
Failure to focus on customer problems
Product teams wasted cycles building solutions based on the needs of the business, without understanding the customer-centered problems to be solved.
Customer-centered discovery & research
We used Problem Framing to prioritize and align the team on customer-centered opportunities that would drive exciting ROI for the company.
Stalled ideas that never got to market
Innovation stalls when the team does more telling than showing. Without practical and actionable outcomes, leaders were forced to defund these projects.
Real ideas, real validation
Our Design Sprint created outputs the team was proud of, and could take to senior leaders for buy-in and budget approval.
Results
Our Design Sprint was the catalyst that enabled a tremendously successful product launch.
Proved a new opportunity in a new market
Validated prototypes with core student persona
Received buy-in from senior leadership
Product team empowered through market launch
Want results like these?Praise from the product lead
Hear from Rob Draper, Head of Product Design at Papa John’s. He reports how our Design Sprint was the innovation catalyst he was hoping it would be.
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