Is 36 months too long for a new-product cycle? It was for Kraft Heinz. So, starting with a pilot project, it was able to cut time to market to just six months by redesigning how people worked. Today, units throughout the company are applying that model’s step-by-step approach to change and are seeing measurable improvements in both performance and employee satisfaction.

In this episode of Leaders at All Levels, Carolina Wosiack, Kraft Heinz’s global head of agile transformation, shares the playbook behind Kraft Heinz’s five-times-faster product launches — and the mindset shift it required.

The Kraft Heinz Playbook: Borrow These Ideas

  • Limit the pipeline. Teams were juggling as many as 20 projects. The “golden number” for Kraft Heinz? Seven. “Strategy is not just what you do — it’s what you don’t do,” Wosiack said.
  • One list, locked. Replace disconnected project plans with a single backlog tied to financial outcomes.
  • Pull, don’t push. Let results create demand.
  • Grant decision rights. Remove hierarchical approvals. A project team in Canada was able to shift from endless sign-offs to quarterly check-ins with two or three people.
  • Stop providing all of the solutions. Wosiack’s new standard response to questions: “I know you know the answer.”
  • Fix the system before it breaks the business. The turning point in a transformation journey, Wosiack said, “is when teams are moving faster than the system.”

How It Works

Wosiack’s group works with teams that want to change; they’re not forced into it. Collaborating with a team in Brazil, for example, they changed employees’ time allocation, expanded decision rights, and increased worker autonomy — and launched a new pasta sauce in six months instead of three years. Time spent in meetings dropped 31%, while employee engagement rose 55%.

Watch until the end, when hosts Kate W. Isaacs and Michele Zanini share four principles worth borrowing for your own team.

Video Credits

Carolina Wosiack is the global head of agile transformation at Kraft Heinz.

Kate W. Isaacs is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Michele Zanini is coauthor of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Humanocracy (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).

M. Shawn Read is the multimedia editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

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