“She guides the team to their own answers…and translates all of that into innovation and action.”

We reconnected to work on a project to develop an innovation process but our work together tackled a lot more – culture, collaboration, and communication.

This is what differentiates Robyn from others, her ability to focus on different business fundamentals, coach and guide the team to their own answers and their own ‘Aha’ moments, and translate all of that into innovation and action.

“[Robyn’s support] enabled our teams to succeed independently.“

Although our people are deeply committed to our mission and exceptional at delivering value in features and products, we engaged Robyn to help us evaluate and develop an innovation practice that works in our complex business and development environment.

Robyn provided an unusual combination of broad experience and insight, stellar facilitation skills, and people/process management skills that allowed her to think and lead across multiple disciplines. She not only quickly understood the complexities of our business and operations, but was an excellent coach and role model with a humility and confidence that supported and enabled our teams to succeed independently.  

Working with Robyn was always a delightful, fun and educational experience, and she kept us moving to the right outcomes, fast. I’d love to work with her again!

“Our (first) project alone is projected to add $6 million dollars to the bottom line!”

Even before I was on board with the project, Robyn was a tremendous help because she helped build the competency from scratch with the management and leadership team. 

Like most change initiatives, the hardest part was getting people on-board.  Throughout the journey, Robyn was a voice of reason, coach, cheerleader, ally, therapist, sounding board, and the support I needed  to continue leading this department.

“The team was able to grow stronger and learn from each other”

We knew our organization needed to be more strategic towards long-term operations in order to plan ahead and prioritize the resources. We needed to create a vision of the future, to determine our goals and how to get there.

We had an idea of what we needed from the process; Robyn helped design the details. She achieved the vision out of the process. But more importantly she helped build teamwork around the process. The team was able to grow stronger and learn from each other; they had an amazing journey.

Processes do not matter, it’s the relationship that does.  Everyone has process, what matters is you can trust her to be on your side. We can trust her to give honest opinions- not say ‘yes’ to make everyone happy. Robyn brought a lot of emotional intelligence to the project.

“Our CEO immediately adopted and acted on the recommendations”

Robyn stands out from other consultants. Yes, she delivers the “answer” but there is so much more: she didn’t tell us “what” and “why” to change, she engaged us in a positive manner to help us understand why and how to change. She listened without judgment and enabled difficult conversations

We were at a juncture with a product where there were disparate views on what had happened and what should happen.  One thing we could all agree that we needed to take this opportunity to learn and improve for the future.

“We now have…ideas we can act on, and new and repeatable approaches and tools to scale what we learned…”

Working collaboratively with Robyn was an invaluable experience for our Discovery product team. We now have a much richer understanding of our teacher users, ideas we can act on, and new and repeatable approaches and tools to scale what we learned working alongside Robyn.

“We are interacting with our customers on a deeper level than we imagined…”

We began working with her because we wanted to better understand our best customers.  We achieved all this and so much more! By watching Robyn conduct interviews, listening to the language she uses, and practicing new skills alongside her, we built our understanding and skills and are regularly doing our own Jobs to be Done research.

“In less than a year, we created and ran (multiple times!) a program that has become the industry gold standard”

In the beginning, we knew that industry leaders were searching for ways to retain their highest potential employees, and that innovation, specifically Intrapreneurship, could be key to achieving that goal.  As a result, we wanted to create a program that taught Intrapreneurship, but we really didn’t know how to teach it.

“Robyn is creative, strategic, thoughtful, organized, and thorough.”

We were trying to create a new program focused on developing Strategic Thinking for women who are members of Women Inspiring Sanofi Excellence, a Sanofi Employee Resource Group.  Our members span geographies, career levels, functions, business units.  Therefore, the program had to be relevant regardless of where you sit within the organization.  We also wanted to maximize utility and impact and tried to optimize the design and format to allow for many different ways of ingesting the content, giving ideas on how to apply it to real life.

“The work Robyn did was instrumental… and allowed us to implement key capabilities…”

We began working with Robyn (when she was a Partner at Innosight) to help us define innovation management best practices, governance and an overall innovation processes.

As we worked together, she was very proactive in identifying opportunities, developing the framework and tools we needed to establish the foundation, and engaging the right stakeholders to help move the initiative forward.  I also discovered her deep knowledge of innovation across industries, both in established companies and the start-up world.

The work Robyn did was instrumental in creating a broader understanding of how we wanted to manage disruptive types of innovation and allowed us to implement key capabilities to do so. I’d recommend Robyn to any organization with innovation needs.

“…We set the company’s foundation for communicating with patients and consumers about something more than just our products.”

There was no script for the work – creating a customer value proposition from scratch that accurately captured the true needs of the customer versus what they “should” want.

“Our work together changed how we engage with our citizen donors.”

Overall

The in-depth ethnographic research Robyn and her team did for us was groundbreaking and made a lasting impact on our business!

The personas they identified really surprised us and had an immediate impact on how we approach engagement with our donors.

Years later, we continue to teach new DonorsChoose.org members about each persona’s motivations and to use these personas to inform how we engage donors.