Schneider Electric
Schneider Electric ships 300+ new products a year across 100 countries. World-class engineering, world-class manufacturing. Customer voices came in, but didn't yet shape the build.
“We invited project teams in the middle of their most stuck projects. We wanted them to play today what they'd do in two months. In real time.”
Damien Carroz, VP Retail, Schneider Electric
You've seen this pattern. Product teams default to it: design the product, validate internally, ship to market, hope customers respond. Training reinforces it: case studies from other companies' wins, best practices, theory. The training never meets a real customer. Schneider was running this loop at scale: 100 countries, 300+ product launches per year, customer voice missing from every decision.
Each cohort came in with their own product. A switch, a power management system, a smart meter, whatever they were currently working on. Day one morning was tools: how to identify the right customers, how to run a discovery interview, how to map assumptions. By the afternoon, they were walking out the door to talk to real installers, real engineers, real users.
We ran the bootcamp cohort after cohort across Schneider's global hubs. Grenoble, Boston, Nashville, Montreal, Victoria, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Bangalore. Each cohort came in with their own project. Each left with customer evidence in hand and a different version of what they were going to build. Some pivoted. A few killed their concept on day two. The rest sharpened the version they came in with.
“Best training in 11 years at Schneider Electric. The hands-on approach, not too much theory but practice, makes the customer focus 100% concrete.”
Bootcamp participant, Offer Manager, Schneider Electric
Over the years, 500 participants went through the bootcamp. 100 new product offers were tested with real customers before any major investment. The training became Schneider's standard pre-build step for any new product project.
Trained on case studies.
Product offers shipped on internal review.
No customer-discovery capability across the business.
Trained on real customers.
100 new offers tested before scope commit.
15 countries running the same protocol.
Now Schneider product teams pick up the phone first. Before they scope the build, they map customer pain points. They iterate the value proposition on customer feedback. The teams stopped shipping anything without customer evidence on the slide.
100 new product offers tested with customers. Some shipped. Some pivoted based on what customers said. Others were killed before further investment. Across the cohorts, participants reported feeling empowered to meet customers directly for the first time.
“When we face our assumptions with the market, we discover that things are completely different. Reality is always different than we think it is.”
Damien Carroz, VP Retail, Schneider Electric
Legacy The Forward Bootcamp became Schneider's standard pre-build training for product teams. The same 2-day protocol ran cohort after cohort across the global hubs. Customer interviews before scope commit became the default.
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Nissan's Chairman's Innovation Award had surfaced a genuinely bold concept: cars that could change color using e-ink technology. John Ferguson's idea represented exactly the kind of breakthrough thinking the award was designed to encourage.
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Renault had built a global automotive empire through engineering excellence and manufacturing discipline. Their ability to coordinate complex cross-functional projects was world-class.
