B Lab: Driving Global Impact with Clarity

The impact

Shifted B Lab from feature-driven to outcome-driven product thinking. Delivered organizational alignment, a clear product vision, and a Now/Soon/Later roadmap tied to user outcomes across certification and SDG programs.

B Lab had strong registrations for its SDG Action Manager and a global certification program, but most companies dropped off before reaching meaningful progress. The problem was not the mission. It was that the organization was measuring the wrong thing, so it kept building the wrong thing. I ran a full discovery engagement and delivered a reframed strategy that gave the team clarity on what to prioritize and why.

A feature factory with a mission attached

B Lab's SDG Action Manager was built to guide companies toward the UN's 2030 Global Goals, but the path there was opaque. Long registration flows, confusing overlap with the B Impact Assessment, manual verification queues, and siloed teams produced a fractured experience, and companies abandoned the process before doing anything meaningful. Over 50% of support tickets were confusion-related, which is a system telling you exactly where it is broken if anyone is reading it.

So I diagnosed the system, not the backlog. 18 one-on-one stakeholder interviews across tech, brand, standards, review, and partner teams; end-to-end process mapping from the marketing site to Salesforce queues; an IA audit and card sort; a review of strategy docs and org-wide goals. The pattern underneath all of it: the roadmap was driven by what teams could technically request, not by what users needed. Every team was improving in isolation with no shared definition of success. That is a feature factory, and adding features to it would have made the drop-off worse, not better.

Change the metric, change what gets built

The reframe was direct: stop shipping features and define what progress looks like for a company chasing its first SDG goal. I set success metrics around time-to-progress, abandonment, and NPS 70+, then gave every team, tech, brand, review, regional, one Now/Soon/Later roadmap to sequence against. Now took the small, compounding wins: copy fixes, unified org language. Soon took IA cleanup and simpler assessments. Later mapped to community features and modular verification. The roadmap was the artifact, but the real deliverable was a different question for the whole org to answer: not "what can we build," but "what moves a company forward."

What this built

• An outcome-based product strategy. The team left with a shared vision and a roadmap that prioritized user progress over feature delivery.
• Reviewer efficiency and cross-regional alignment. The unified queueing model connected global teams around consistent prioritization for the first time.
• A playbook for long-term modernization. The roadmap, discovery artifacts, and defined metrics gave B Lab a foundation to keep improving without outside help.

Sources

• John Cutler, "The Feature Factory" via The Beautiful Mess -- the output-over-outcomes pattern this engagement diagnosed and reversed