DHL's internal accelerator, BRAIN, existed to take product innovation ideas from concept to launch. The process was broken at the most basic level, there was no reliable path from having an idea to actually shipping a product. Every idea moved through a single, sequential process end to end, with no way to test, learn, or adjust along the way.
The work meant introducing a lean, iterative process into an organization built around a more traditional, established way of working. Changing the process wasn't just a design problem, it required the organization itself to accept a fundamentally different way of moving ideas forward.
BRAIN was running product innovation on a waterfall process, one long sequence from idea to launch, with no way to test or adjust along the way. The fix wasn't a better plan up front. It was replacing the sequence itself with something closer to CI/CD, continuous, iterative, testable at every stage, not a single bet made once and carried all the way through.
I researched the existing process first, to understand exactly where ideas were stalling and why. From there, I defined a new OKR framework to give teams clear, measurable goals at each stage instead of a single undefined endpoint, and facilitated workshops to redesign the process itself around continuous, iterative delivery, borrowing directly from CI/CD practice in software development rather than treating it as a loose analogy. Making that process change stick also required a change in how ownership was structured across the pipeline, not just how the steps themselves worked.
The redesigned process reduced time-to-market by 50%.