CASE STUDY . 04 . STAKEHOLDER ALIGNMENT
Same industry. Similar customer. The assumptions almost shipped.
Two similar businesses. A simple reuse plan. A question worth pausing on.
A Waterworks e-commerce strategy was on the table. Reusing the Plumbing and HVAC code made sense on the surface. Whether it made sense underneath was a different question.
ROLE
Head of User Experience
COMPANY
Waterworks . Reece USA
YEAR
2021- 2024
FOCUS
Executive workshops . Stakeholder alignment
THE OPPORTUNITY
The shortcut made sense. Until it didn't.
Waterworks needed its own digital commerce platform. The team's plan was to extend what already worked for Plumbing and HVAC. Same parent company, similar industry, similar customer. The shortcut would save months of engineering work and let the launch hit its window.
It was a reasonable plan. The kind of plan smart teams make when they're moving fast on what looks like solid ground. The question worth pausing on was whether the customer underneath was really the same person.
THE QUESTION WORTH PAUSING ON
Same plumbing fittings. Different customer behind them.
Across early conversations about the build, the team kept saying "the customer" with confidence. Each function meant something slightly different. Engineering was thinking about feasibility and reuse. Product was thinking about features and timelines. Business was thinking about revenue accounts.
That was the gap. Not that anyone was wrong. Just that nobody had put the three pictures side by side and asked whether they were the same picture.
WORKSHOPS BROUGHT CLARITY
IT, product, and business in one room. The ecosystem on the wall.
I designed and led the Ecosystem Exploration Workshop to put the question on the wall together. Customer segments, procurement workflows, key touchpoint, and the relationships between them. Each function brought what it knew. The work was building one shared picture from three partial ones.
The workshop did what workshops do when they're designed well. It surfaced the disagreement that had been quietly running underneath every conversation, and it gave the room a way to resolve it together.
SERVICE BLUEPRINTS BROUGHT COMMON UNDERSTANDING
Public contractor. Private contractor. Online customer.
The workshop's analysis pointed the team toward a different answer: Private contractors, not municipalities, were the real drivers of the Waterworks business. With the customer question resolved, I led the team in building service blueprints for three distinct customer types.
The blueprints made the differences impossible to dismiss and gave engineering, product, and business the same reference point. The conversation moved "From 'is this the same customer?' to 'here's what we keep, here's what's new.'"
The customer wasn't who the team had been planning for. The room arrived at that answer together. That's why it stuck.
Public contractor
.png)
Private contractor
Online customer
.png)
MVP WORKSHOPS NAILED WHAT TO BUILD FIRST
From three blueprints to one sequenced roadmap.
I facilitated MVP workshops with IT, product, and business to translate the blueprints into prioritized features. Every feature evaluated on two axes: customer value and business impact.
The team had a clear answer to the question that usually consumes weeks of meetings: What do we build first? Engineering had its priorities, product had its sequencing, business had its trade off framework, and all three were tied back to the same customer reference point.
KEEPING THE PLATFORM ALIGNED
Co-creation in the room. Feedback loops between releases.
Aligning once isn't enough at this scale. Co-creation and ideation sessions kept in-person and remote stakeholders connected to the customer throughout the build. Between releases, the work stayed honest through stakeholder feedback loops, iterative usability testing, and data-driven decisions on every enhancement.
THE IMPACT
The assumption didn't ship. The right platform did.
92%
stakeholder satisfaction with the alignment process
3
distinct customer journeys mapped and validated
strategic pivot from assumed audience to actual revenue driver
The lasting outcome wasn't the platform itself. It was the muscle the teams built for surfacing assumptions before they became expensive. Stakeholder alignment moved from a thing we hoped would happen to a thing we knew how to facilitate.