The €-Million Question. Save it - or kill it?

PLC Case Study · 014/A/EN · Open Preview

A strategic CRM program at a European market leader had consumed significant resources without delivering proportional value. With a double-digit million-euro investment planned for the next two years, the board faced a binary decision. This is the story of how 18 months changed the answer.

Sector	Residential Building Technology · Global
Organization	~24,000 Employees Worldwide
Scope	Strategic CRM · Multi-Market Rollout
Approach	Process · Structure · Culture
Engagement	~18 Months · Active & Advisory

A Question on the Table

Imagine a board meeting where the next agenda item is a flagship program with a double-digit million-euro forward investment — and where serious voices are asking whether it should continue at all.

The program was real. The numbers were real. Two years of substantial spend had not produced the visible value the organization had expected. Coordination layers had multiplied. Delivery had not.

The instinctive response in most enterprises is more governance, more reporting, more frameworks — anything that feels like control. What this organization did was almost the opposite. And eighteen months later, the question on the table was no longer “should we stop it?” but “how fast can we scale it?”

The starting point: heavy on activity, light on outcomes

From the outside, the program looked busy. Multiple product areas, distributed teams across several European locations, external partners, a sophisticated scaled-agile setup with ceremonies, planning increments, and dependency mappings. Documentation existed. Boards existed. Meetings happened.

From the inside, the picture was harder to read.

2 years	of substantial spend had not produced the visible value the organization expected.
€xx m+	double-digit million-euro investment planned for the next two years — under serious sponsor scrutiny.
~0	observable flow of work end-to-end, despite a fully implemented scaled-agile framework.

Most strikingly: there was little observable flow of work. People were occupied with managing complexity rather than delivering customer value. And the cost of that occupation was no longer easy to defend against the value being produced.

18 months later — what had changed

The engagement didn’t add frameworks. It removed complexity, surfaced what was actually happening, and confronted the interplay between process, structure, and culture that no single intervention could have fixed on its own.

→ End-to-end flow visible at Product Team level for the first time. A flow-based system captured all major intake channels in one place.

→ First markets live with active users. Rollout shifted from one-off heroics toward a standardized, repeatable model.

→ Outsourcing dependency substantially reduced — and throughput went up, not down. A smaller, in-house team is now delivering more than the previous, much larger and heavily-staffed setup. We didn’t add manpower. We changed the way the organization works.

→ The sponsor-level question changed. From “should we stop the program?” to “how fast can we scale rollout?”

→ “Product Leadership” was launched. From “Leadership is being practiced differently; behaviors and mindsets reflect a different, more mature approach”

How they got there

The engagement unfolded as an evolutionary change process across six overlapping phases — each one built on what the organization could absorb next.

Figure 1 — The six overlapping phases of the engagement, spanning ~18 months from summer 2024.

1. Turn-around — restoring legitimacy and sponsor confidence
2. Developing the Product Team
3. Establishing Flow
4. Establishing Product Leadership
5. Growing Maturity
6. Establishing Rollout Excellence

What each phase actually involved — the diagnostics, the interventions, the moments where the program could have gone the other way — is in the full case study.

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Six phases. The full diagnostic. The interventions that actually moved the needle. The before/after across process, structure, and culture. And the key learnings transferable to any large transformation program. Free with a Library account.

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Anonymized case study. Based on a real client engagement by Product Leaders Consulting. The client’s identity, technology choices, geographies, specific dates, and selected figures have been generalized to protect confidentiality. The case focuses on the transferable patterns, the diagnostic approach, and the outcomes — not on individual organizational details.

© 2026 Product Leaders Consulting GmbH & Product Leaders Inc. · PLC Case Study 014/A/EN · Open Preview · Release: May 20, 2026