Reframing Strategy with Sticky Notes and Sharp Thinking
Bringing clarity, alignment, and velocity to a strategic transformation through collaborative design.
What happens when a major enterprise needs to pivot quickly but struggles to align its leadership team? You roll up your sleeves and guide them through a three-day remote sprint. I helped a cross-functional group make decisions faster, identify shared priorities, and translate strategy into tangible next steps.
💡 The Backdrop
Leadership had big ambitions. Their goal? Shift the organization from a reactive, siloed structure toward an experience-led, product-driven model. But between competing priorities, fragmented communication, and ambiguous goals, they were spinning in circles.
That's where I came in.
🧠A Different Kind of Design Sprint
The traditional playbook wouldn't cut it. Instead, we designed a collaborative remote sprint tailored for a dozen leaders spread across teams and time zones. My role was to co-facilitate the sprint and lead the design work throughout the week.
Day-by-Day Breakdown
Day 1: We clarified the challenge, mapped the system, and surfaced the biggest blockers.
Day 2: Using How Might We statements, we reframed challenges into opportunities, sketched ideas, and voted on high-potential directions.
Day 3: We transformed a pile of sticky notes and sketches into a shared strategic narrative, wrapped in a visual prototype.
A clearer vision emerges — Remote sprint setup in FigJam. After three days of collaborative work, the board was filled with insights, sketches, and shared decisions.
🎯 Results That Mattered
The impact went far beyond a prototype:
- Sharper alignment: Teams gained clarity on which bets to prioritize and which distractions to drop.
- Accelerated decisions: What usually took weeks was resolved in days, helping key leaders move forward with confidence.
- Shared vision: By co-creating the prototype, stakeholders saw their ideas reflected in the outcome. This dramatically improved buy-in and helped rally others around the new direction.
✅ Key Learnings
- Facilitated collaboration creates momentum. Structured sprints reduce hesitation and build alignment faster than decks and meetings ever could.
- Visualizing strategy fosters actionable discussions. Diagrams, boards, and prototypes make it easier to break down complexity and communicate vision.
- Prototypes aren't just for users. They're powerful tools for leadership to pressure-test assumptions and drive internal alignment.
📊 Estimated Outcomes
- Cut alignment time from 4+ weeks to just 3 days.
- Increased cross-functional collaboration, with participants positively reporting on clarity and involvement post-sprint.
- 3 months later, several sprint outcomes had evolved into funded initiatives, endorsed at the VP level.