Global Medical Device — Prioritisation System
A global medical-device company, replacing an informal prioritisation habit with a system the organisation could run on.
Context
A global medical-device company whose product and R&D pipeline was prioritised through a long-standing informal process — effective when the people running it had been in post for a decade, fragile the moment they moved on.
Challenge
The company was growing, and so was the number of credible candidates. The informal system was starting to produce inconsistent calls, and institutional knowledge was concentrating in a few individuals in ways that scared the board.
Approach
We designed a prioritisation system that captured the implicit criteria the long-tenured executives had been using and made them explicit — then stress-tested the system against the last two years of actual decisions to confirm it produced the same calls those executives would have made.
Only then was it adopted. The system did not replace judgement; it made the organisation's judgement portable.
What shifted
Prioritisation decisions became more consistent across business units. New entrants to the executive layer could participate meaningfully in portfolio calls from month one. Institutional memory stopped being a single point of failure.
What shifted: judgement that lived in people's heads became judgement the organisation could run.
Client identity anonymised. Specific metrics available under NDA.