Developing an Innovation Operating Model for a Fortune 500 Company

Challenge

The client team faced a high volume of feature requests from other departments and had difficulty prioritizing these alongside their own initiatives. They also struggled with rationalizing their prioritization decisions and quantifying their impacts for management.

Ruby’s Role & Strategic Approach

Phase 1: Research

• Led stakeholder interviews and cross-functional workshops to map pain points and define success metrics.

• Conducted job shadowing to document as-is workflows and bottlenecks.

• Key Insight: 60% of "urgent" requests lacked measurable outcomes or conflicted with annual OKRs.

Phase 2: Framework Design

• Architected a RICE-based prioritization framework that measured impact based on strategic team and organizational goals.

Phase 3: Operationalization

• Trained 11 analysts in hypothesis development and A/B test design, standardizing experimentation practices.

• Implemented and facilitated bi-weekly standups, bi-monthly triages, and quarterly sessions for ideation workshops, roadmap reviews, and retrospectives to compare projected versus actual outcomes for continuous refinement.

• Built lightweight tracking via automated Jira scoring.

Impact

Roadmap churn was cut from 45% to 20%.

This new framework enabled the Digital team to objectively identify high-impact features and communicate the rationale to management and other departments. The result was a significant improvement in the Digital team’s ability to deliver on its strategic goals.

The operating model was subsequently adopted by four other departments.