CASE STUDY
Co-Creating a Strategy That Stuck, From the Bottom Up
Uniting a global research and analytics product team around a clear north star, customer-centered priorities, and a go-to-market strategy that built clarity and lasting impact.
Speed to impact: 5 weeks
The challenge
A leading global research and analytics organization had recently reorganized its product team. Half of the team was new, half had long tenure, and trust was low. With no clear strategy or north star, the group was split in different directions, consumed by tech debt and day-to-day troubleshooting. Cross-functional departments, including product, engineering, and architecture, were siloed with competing priorities. The team itself was spread across the UK, EU, US, and India, adding another layer of complexity to alignment and collaboration. And, decision-making was often driven by technical wants and strong opinions rather than by customer needs.
What was missing was not just a strategist, but a leader who could pull it all together. Existing leadership was strong in technology but lacked the experience to create and drive a strategy that could unite the team around a shared vision.
The approach
Sugra&Co. embedded directly with teams across the organization, starting with active listening and trust-building. We surfaced insights from prior research that had been left on the shelf and designed and facilitated a series of four tailored design-thinking workshops to unite cross-functional and globally spread teams.
In a deliberate departure from the usual top-down process, these workshops intentionally left out senior leadership. Instead, we brought together middle management and practitioners across product, engineering, and architecture. To anchor the work in customer needs, we also introduced the organization’s UX team into the process for the first time, giving them a seat at the table and a lasting role in shaping decisions.
The result was a focused sub-strategy for the product team. It reflected the needs of their customers while directly laddering up to the organization’s broader enterprise strategy. This gave the team clarity on what mattered most within their remit, while ensuring their work aligned with the company’s overall direction and the priorities of the C-Suite.
Once this sub-strategy was shaped from the ground up, leadership was brought in to validate, refine, and formally endorse it. Because it had already been co-created by the people doing the work and backed by existing research and data, leaders could confidently stand behind it.
To make the future tangible, we also designed product concepts that showed what success could look like, turning an abstract strategy into something everyone could rally around.
The impact
“Strategy only works if it sticks.”
By co-creating from the ground up, making strategy tangible, and embedding new ways of working, the organization built a foundation that lasted.
Cross-functional and globally distributed teams aligned on a unified north star, a strategic roadmap, and a go-to-market strategy that gave clarity both inside the organization and in how products would reach customers.
A bottom-up process built trust and ensured the product team’s sub-strategy reflected customer needs and aligned with the organization’s broader strategy, making leadership endorsement far easier.
Buy-in was secured across the organization because diverse stakeholders had a hand in shaping the strategy.
New processes and tools were embedded to support collaboration and sustain momentum.
The UX function, once peripheral, became fully integrated into the product team’s ways of working, ensuring that research-backed customer insights translated into product features prioritized by product managers.
Tangible product concepts gave teams a clear vision of what success could look like, allowing them to build from concrete examples instead of starting from scratch.
"Three years later, the strategy we built together is still our cornerstone. It guides new product development, gives us the confidence to sunset what no longer adds value, and keeps customer needs at the center of our decisions."
— Vice President of Product Management, Global Analytics and Research Organization
Consulting Engagements Behind This Work
Chaos to Clarity
Untangling competing priorities and creating a unified north star.
Buy-in Builder
Co-creating across functions to secure alignment and leadership endorsement.
Vision to Action
Shaping a strategy that laddered up to the enterprise vision with a clear roadmap for cross-teams.
Concept Prototyping
Designing tangible product concepts so teams could rally around a clear future.