FORWARD | Innovation Engineering

For VP of Innovation who must deliver viable products in the next 12 months.

Stop pushing technology. Start pulling customers.

We embed with your team until the product reaches paying customers, or we kill it together.

Book a 30-min discovery call See how it works ↓

How the next 18 months play out

2 plans to launch a new product

Two playbooks branch out from the same starting point. Only one ends in a working product within 6 months.

Plan A

Technology-push

The default playbook

Month 1-2

Engineering, marketing, and product align internally around the idea. Someone walks into the kickoff with the end product already decided. No customer in the room.

Month 3-6

The build starts from internal consensus. Engineering executes, but no one on the build team has talked to a customer. Requirements arrive filtered through product, sales, or marketing, and features get chosen by internal vote. Buzzwords stand in for value propositions.

Month 7-9

The beta runs with friendly customers, organized by sales rather than engineering. The customer voice stays one or two steps from the people writing the code, and what little signal arrives comes too late to change the build.

Month 10-18

The launch happens. Sales reports that the market isn't ready. Customers nod politely and don't buy. Engineering moves on, still defending decisions that started with opinion.

Plan B

Customer-pull

Installed in 6 months

Month 1

Talk to 20-30 customers first. Engineering, product, and marketing sit in the room with customers before the internal kickoff. Real answers replace internal opinions, and the end product everyone had in mind gets challenged against what customers actually pull.

Month 2

Test the risky bets early. The biggest unknowns go in front of real prospects: who wants this, would they pay, can we build it. Ideas with no customer pull get killed before engineering commits. The strong ones survive with proof.

Month 3-4

Build what survived. Engineering builds the validated concept. They know what to build and who it's for because they were in the customer conversations. Each iteration goes back to the same customers for feedback.

Month 5-6

Ship and iterate. The product reaches paying customers. Engineers hear feedback directly from users rather than filtered through sales. Customer pull shows up in signed POs and committed pilot deployments. The team has the muscle to run the playbook again without us.

What you walk away with

Four outcomes by month six.

Not a slide deck. Not a workshop debrief. Outcomes your team can point to in the next budget cycle.

A validated product concept

Tested with 20-30 real prospects before engineering commits a single sprint. You know what to build, who it's for, and whether they'll pay.

Customer pull, evidenced

Signed POs, committed pilots, and reorder signals from the prospects who saw the concept earliest. Not promises, receipts.

An operating team

Engineering, product, and marketing trained to run the customer-pull playbook on the next launch. We leave; the muscle stays.

Engineering capacity protected

Ideas with no customer pull get killed in weeks, not in year-two budget reviews. Your roadmap stops carrying dead weight.

Active Installations

We don't run workshops and leave. We embed with your team until the project reaches the market — or we kill it together.

Methodology

The method.

From first customer interview to market launch.

Discovery

Discover Real Customer Demand

Talk to customers. Understand their pain. Validate that a real problem exists before investing in solutions.

Decision

Decide What to Fund or Kill

Use evidence to allocate resources. Fund what's working. Kill what isn't. No more zombie projects.

Execution

Build, Test, and Validate

Run rapid experiments. Stress-test assumptions across desirability, feasibility, and viability before scaling.

Proof of Impact

Beyond the tools and methodology, Forward taught us how to think and work like entrepreneurs.
— Ivan Ollivier, Innovation Lab Director, Nissan Europe

We appreciated Forward's expertise in innovation management, which we didn't find with our other partners.
— Allianz Trade

The confrontation with the reality of the passenger was an eye-opener. Meeting customers and understanding their needs is something we never did before.
— Lagardère Travel Retail, Digital Team

See all client transformations →

System Upgrade

From push to pull.

The shift from technology-push to market-pull changes how your organisation operates at every level.

Before After

Every project gets funded because nobody wants to say no.

A governed pipeline where only projects with customer evidence get resources.

Engineering builds what it thinks is clever. Sales tries to sell it afterwards.

Teams validate demand before committing engineering resources.

Innovation is a side project someone runs when they have time.

A structured process that runs in parallel with core operations.

Customer feedback arrives after launch — usually as complaints.

Customer evidence is collected before a single spec is written.

Killing a project feels like admitting failure.

Killing a project early is celebrated as capital saved.

The innovation team operates in a bubble. The rest of the company ignores it.

Innovation capability is embedded in how product teams work every day.

Core Modules

Visible impact.

We run projects. Those projects create results. Over time, those results change how the organization decides what to build.

Speed

Faster from decision to market

We compress the gap between strategic ambition and first commercial revenue.

Risk Reduction

Market Certainty

We replace boardroom assumptions with direct customer evidence — interviews, prototype tests, live signals — before your engineering team commits to a specification.

Autonomy

Teams that execute without constant escalation

Remove leadership bottlenecks. We build teams with clear decision rights so your organisation can move without everything escalating to the top.

Money

Less budget on the wrong bets

Stop funding 'zombie projects.' We install a simple governance threshold: if a project can't show customer traction by a defined milestone, it stops — freeing budget for the ones that can.

Who you'll be working with

Engineer by training. Operator by trade. 30 years installing customer-pull in industrial teams.

"I'm an engineer. I spent the first half of my career inside industrial companies watching good products die because no one talked to a customer until launch. I built FORWARD to fix that.

Every engagement, I sit in customer interviews with your engineers. I'm not the consultant who hands off to a junior. I show up and run the playbook with your team, week after week.

The engagement has succeeded when your team stops asking permission to kill a bad idea. When they can do this without me, my job is done."

Franck Debane, founder of Forward Partners

How it works in practice

A typical engagement lasts 12 weeks. We embed with your team — not as observers, but as operators. The work starts with customer interviews and ends with validated concepts and a funded roadmap. Your team runs the process with us. By the end, they can run it without us.

We take on four to six engagements per year

Before we engage.

We only work with teams whose survival depends on delivering business impact. Here's what we need from you.

A VP who owns the P&L impact

Not just the budget line. A senior leader whose number moves when the launch lands.

A live product or category launch

With a market-facing deadline. Not a training exercise, not an innovation theatre.

Willingness to talk to customers

Engineering, product, and marketing in the room with prospects from week one.

Commitment to act on what you learn

If the customer doesn't pull, we drop the project. Together.

If your team meets these four conditions, the next step is a 30-minute call. If you don't, we'll tell you.

Book a 30-min discovery call