Two proposals signed off and put into action

The situation

Nestlé Purina PetCare is one of the two biggest pet food makers in most of Europe, and sells mainly through retail partners such as the big supermarket chains. In 2020 its European customer supply-chain team had two big pieces of work on the table.

The first was about its retail partners. For years the company had focused on pet owners, and hadn’t treated the retailers who sell them as customers in their own right. That had caused friction. The team wanted to change it: to understand what the big retailers needed, and to win new, smaller retailers who would need different packaging and different terms.

The second was new. The team had been asked to work out the logistics and packaging for an ecommerce business, in a company built around shops.

Neither could be done alone. Every idea needed support from several functions, 40 brands and five regions, and people’s incentives didn’t always line up. The team had made some progress the usual way, with slide-deck meetings where people nodded and agreed. But when it came to doing the work, those commitments tended to fade.

What we did

The team’s leader, Bill Papantoniou, Head of Customer Supply Chain, had worked at Amazon and knew its Working Backwards method. Before you build anything, you write the press release you’d publish on launch day and an FAQ, from the customer’s point of view. Then you share the draft, take the hard questions, and rewrite it until the idea holds up. He asked me to train his cross-functional team in it.

We’d planned to meet in person. COVID hit just as the sessions were being scheduled, so we moved the training online: four weeks of short sessions with group exercises in between. People worked in small groups on their own real ideas, wrote their press releases and FAQs, and I reviewed them with the group live. Between sessions they took the feedback away, improved their drafts and worked through them with each other, building alignment as they went.

Because the groups mixed people from different functions, they also learned from each other, about customers and about how the rest of the business worked. By the end they had a clearer, shared picture of the company, its strategy and the problems they needed to solve.

Writing the two proposals

After the training, the team used the method for real. They wrote two proposals: one for their existing retail partners, and one for ecommerce.

Then they took the drafts to stakeholders across the company before any decision meeting, asked for input, and rewrote the proposals with that feedback. People could see their own concerns answered in the document, in writing.

What happened

By the time the proposals reached senior leadership, everyone affected had already been asked and their views were in. Some budget holders had first refused to back the proposals, because the cost would land on their budgets. They came round, because the business case for the company as a whole was strong. Senior leadership signed off both proposals, and the work went ahead.

The commitments held better than before. Writing and discussing the documents made people think harder than the old slide-deck meetings had. The leaders involved said they felt their interests and concerns had been heard and taken into account in the decision. When the stakeholders involved were surveyed afterwards, 85% of them said they’d recommend the approach to their colleagues.

The team went on to become a lighthouse for ecommerce across the Nestlé Group, with other parts of the business coming to ask how to solve similar problems. A few months later, Bill invited me to present the method to colleagues across the wider Nestlé Group, and shared his team’s experience in the same session.

Why it worked

• A written proposal has to explain the customer, the problem and the cost in full sentences, so the gaps a slide can hide show up on the page.

• Stakeholders shaped the proposals before the decision. Nobody in the room was seeing them for the first time, so the meeting could focus on the decision itself.

• Mixing functions in the training meant people understood each other’s constraints before they started writing.