As every coffee nerd can tell, you must buy excellent quality coffee to stand a chance. It is no different with business.

Stakeholder considerations on feasibility, hypotheses on pain points, qualitative and quantitative research into user needs, market trends - I have become rigorous and picky over the years about generating the best quality input. Yet, the most important ingredient is people: I have been fortunate to work and lead brilliant multidisciplinary teams of product managers, marketers, designers, and developers.

Grinding the beans is all about assessing and setting up all the information you’ve gathered about your coffee in a structured way to navigate the system it lives in.

It’s about frameworks, tools and mental models such as Business Model Canvas, co-design workshops, or MVP. I relentlessly breathe in the caffeinated smell of our emerging knowledge of the world. Business meets science here: it is not about knowing but about learning.

The stage of synthesis - where everything is connected.

Making coffee is 25-30 seconds of chaotic mess, full of ambiguity and uncertainty. But creating something new is always messy. Getting too hung up on manufacturing neatness in the process might derail you from what matters: keeping your finger on the interaction of the key elements. One thing coffee teaches you is that success and improvement come from endless Test/Learn/Adapt cycles.

Just like a funky, washed Columbian coffee, bold ideas often need to be diluted (with the familiar sweetness of milk) and introduced step-by-step.

By learning what clicks with your audience, whether a product manager or an SME customer, a flat white-lover or an espresso fan, you need to tailor your message.