Creating Space for Customer-Driven Innovation
Creating Space for Customer-Driven Innovation
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Business Need
Business Need
For a global technology leader in Silicon Valley, maintaining leadership in enterprise products required a continuous pipeline of innovation grounded in customer needs. To help spark new product opportunities, a Senior Director of Engineering at Cisco Systems brought in Brenda, an embedded Agile consultant, to design and facilitate the company's first cross-functional ideation workshop.
Challenges
Challenges
Technical mindset: Engineering teams brought deep technical expertise, but the workshop needed to create a stronger connection between technical possibilities and customer needs.
Time and cost constraints: With engineers stepping away from core responsibilities, the workshop needed to maximize limited time and generate actionable ideas within a half-day format.
Cross-functional collaboration: Bringing together Product Managers, Technical Marketing Engineers, and Software/Field Engineers across Wireless, Switching, Routing, and IoT required intentional participant selection and group structures to enable meaningful collaboration.
Organizational culture: The organization relied on established leadership-driven planning processes, requiring a facilitation approach that encouraged broader participation and collaborative idea generation.
Approach
Approach
User-centered personas: Each group created fictional customer personas to guide ideation and ensure solutions addressed real customer needs.
Lean & Kanban methods: Workshop activities incorporated visualization, dot-voting, Work-in-Progress limits, and a retrospective to maximize value and minimize wasted effort.
Optimized group structure: Worked with VPs and directors to select 3–5 participants per group, ensuring a balanced mix of roles for effective collaboration.
Collaborative facilitation: Established a structured yet flexible environment that encouraged participants to self-organize, challenge assumptions, and contribute ideas across disciplines.
Results
Results
Established a repeatable model for cross-functional innovation that increased engagement, encouraged broader participation, and created a foundation for future ideation initiatives.
Generated 40 customer-centered product ideas during a single half-day innovation session.
Identified the top three concepts through cross-functional consensus among 20 participants, aligning emerging ideas with organizational priorities.
Documented concepts in Cisco’s Innovation Portal to support Proofs of Concept, Hackathons, and future R&D initiatives.
Established a repeatable model for cross-functional innovation that increased engagement, encouraged broader participation, and created a foundation for future ideation initiatives.
This engagement demonstrates how structured facilitation can bridge technical expertise, customer insight, and organizational priorities to create clarity, alignment, and momentum around new ideas.
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