Every new Velcro Companies product starts in R&D, moving through a stage-gate process shared by teams in four countries. In a recent Shibumi webinar, Velcro Companies’ Mark Clarner, Global Director of R&D, and James Tardiff, Senior Staff Engineer of R&D, shared how they modernized that process by moving the company’s product innovation portfolio out of spreadsheets and into a single source of truth.
Along the way, their own plan evolved. The team started its rollout with a simple approach: crawl, walk, run. As the program matured, they realized there was an important step in between, and the roadmap became crawl, walk, brisk jog, run, then sprint.
In the recent webinar discussing their undertaking, the Velcro team was joined by Bryan Seyfarth, founder and CEO of BrightFire, Inc., a Shibumi partner. Velcro manages its program in the BrightFire App for Innovation Pipeline Management, which is powered by the Shibumi platform. You can watch the full webinar here.
The problem with “good enough”
Velcro’s process was solid. The tools behind it weren’t.
“We were using spreadsheets to track our portfolio and creating dashboards in Excel. It was a very manual process.”
An error could take hours to find, and with R&D teams in four countries, each location had developed its own way of doing things.
The bigger cost was perspective. Without a full view of the portfolio, every project looked worth pursuing on its own.
“At the end of the day, resources are limited.”
Starting small on purpose
“We didn’t want to boil the ocean.”
The team focused first on the projects that needed the most rigor and saved everything else for later. They pulled in finance early to make sure the numbers held up, and wrapped the rollout in a little over six weeks, all while keeping up their day jobs in intellectual property.
Even the hardest part turned into a win. Importing existing projects forced a closer look at the process itself, and with Bryan’s help, the team aligned its three-stage and five-stage paths into something simpler.
Visibility creates demand
Once people could see the data, they wanted more of it. With BrightFire, powered by Shibumi, R&D teams and executives now have visibility into the full product innovation portfolio, from financial dashboards down to individual project pages. That visibility drove adoption on its own. In a single month, and during peak vacation season, more than three-quarters of Velcro’s licenses were in active use. Employees beyond the original user group started requesting access, and the team has added seats to keep up with demand. The old spreadsheets are gone, and so are more than 30% of the team’s stage-gate forms.
Some of the payoff was unexpected. Forecasting every gate date, not just the next one, helped the team spot launch bottlenecks early. Having product and technology projects in one place meant teams in different markets started discovering work that could help their own.
Trust is the real milestone
Velcro’s Chief Technology and Innovation Officer played a big role in getting leadership on board, partly because she knew exactly what the CFO and CEO would want to see. Project leaders bought in because they finally had control over their own data.
The team also didn’t rush the change. They started by dropping screenshots from BrightFire into existing leadership decks, then gradually shifted to presenting from the platform itself.
For Mark, all of it came down to one idea.
“You can have data, but people have to believe in that data.”
A single source of truth only works if people trust it enough to stop checking the old spreadsheets.
Picking up speed
Next, the team plans to add resource allocation, more custom dashboards, and a way for gatekeepers to weigh in before meetings. They’re not sprinting yet, but the brisk jog is well within reach.
To hear the full story from Mark, James, and Bryan, watch the webinar on demand. And if your team is ready for more visibility into its innovation pipeline, reach out to Shibumi to see how we and BrightFire can help.