Capability Building · EST. 2011 · APAC

Six months to market. Nestlé's executive team aligned across marketing, sales, legal, and distribution for the first time.

The Situation

Nestlé Foods Oceania engaged ZXM to design a faster path from concept to market for a new product range — one that had been stalled inside the organisation’s traditional functional structure. The executive general manager commissioned ZXM to work directly with the senior leadership team across marketing, sales, legal, product management, logistics, research and development, and distribution.

The diagnosis

The six functions in Oceania Foods had one initiative but no shared operating rhythm. Each function had its own priorities, timelines, and definition of quality and hand-off points. The initiative was visible inside each silo. It was invisible as a whole.

Faster to market

Reduce lead time of traditional projects to get a product to consumers.

Improve workforce effectiveness

Maximise the collective knowledge of product leadership by working in a team with laser focus on a single, collaborative goal.

Focus on value creation

Re-prioritise the focus on value-based metrics and MVP to help differentiate business-as-usual and line management work from their collective strategic focus as a team.

What changed

Before any new ways of working were designed, ZXM mapped the coordination structure across all six functions — specifically to locate where decisions were slowing down and where handovers were producing rework. The diagnostic found that no single leader had visibility of the full initiative. Each function was managing its own workstream without a mechanism to surface dependencies or make trade-offs in real time.

ZXM built a single Product Backlog representing the full initiative — the first time every leader could see all the work in one place. A cross-functional leadership team was formed with a shared Sprint cadence, joint planning sessions, and a common Definition of Done across all functions. ZXM then coached the team through two-week Sprints to plan and execute sourcing immersions, assess cold, fresh, and frozen product options, and sequence the decisions required to bring them to the Australian market.

What held

Nestlé Foods Oceania delivered to market in six months — a target that had previously been blocked for years inside the organisation’s functional structure. Transparency across all six departments, previously absent, was established within the first Sprint. Cross-functional decisions that had taken months through formal handover processes were being made in days.

The operating model did not revert after ZXM’s engagement ended. The leadership team continued using the shared backlog and Sprint cadence as their primary coordination mechanism for subsequent product initiatives.