Longfield

Seven people, seven products

Longfield is a large energy company with a new customer platform to build. When I arrived at the first workshop, I met seven stakeholders who each described a different product. Billing wanted a ledger. Marketing wanted a storefront. Field operations wanted a job board.

Nobody was wrong. The company needed all of it. But nobody had ever been in a room together to decide what came first.

Making the disagreement visible

I ran four short workshops, each with one job: put every idea on the wall, sort them by what a customer would actually notice, name the trade offs out loud, and agree an order. The trick was to ask people to argue for each other's priorities, not their own.

By the end of the second session the wall had stopped being a list and started to look like a plan.

One page everyone signed

The output was a single page: three phases, what each one delivered for customers, and what was deliberately left for later. Every stakeholder signed it. When the usual disagreements came back in month three, the page was there to point at.

I also mentored two junior designers on the team, which taught me to explain my process out loud instead of just doing it.

The outcome

The first phase shipped on time, and the roadmap held for the next two quarters without a major rewrite, which the programme director described as unusual.