Zoofari
A workshop, a team, and the process book that empowered them
Arm & Hammer's pet-care team needed an R&D push, and they wanted to use SuperZoo (the trade show) as a research lab. The Collective got the brief. I designed the workshop. Schedule, exercises, prompts, the rubric, the rooms, the supplies list, the way Day 1 fed into Day 2. Everything that needed to be true on the morning the workshop opened.
Then I handed the workshop off to a facilitator and a team to run. That part is the point. The work was designed in such a way that someone else could pick it up and execute it without me in the room, which is how you tell whether a workshop has actually been designed rather than just hosted. The team led the floor walk at SuperZoo, ran the Princeton ideation, prioritized the outcomes, and brought back a portfolio of concepts ready for product roadmap.
After that, I designed the process book that walked Church & Dwight's leadership through what the team had made. Cover, structure, the rhythm between schedule pages and finished concepts, the photographic field record, the sketched product portfolio. Empowering a team to do the work means giving them a document at the end that makes their work look as good as it actually is.
The workshop
Designed once, run by someone else.
The workshop ran across two phases. Phase One was a field study at SuperZoo in Las Vegas: walking the floor, identifying patterns and trends, talking to consumers and category buyers, capturing pain points the team would later turn into prompts. Phase Two was a Princeton-based ideation session that took the field findings and pushed them into product-form sketches.
The output
Twelve concepts, ready for roadmap.
Each concept that came out of the workshop got the same treatment in the book (Name, Pillar, Pitch) and a hand sketch by one of the workshop participants. Same template across every concept so leadership could compare them at a glance.
The book in the wild
The artifact ends in a stack on the desk.
The book lands on someone's desk in New Jersey alongside the workshop residue: the yellow legal pad full of in-the-room scribbles, the printed Reddit-quote research, the marker-on-grid graphs, the "How might we" strip down the side of a worksheet. The book is the version of all of that you can hand to a VP. Both belong on the same desk.
The internal planning deck that set up the workshop opened with a leaping cat and the line "No cats were harmed on this safari." The whole project ran on that energy. The trip was the safari. The cats are the consumers. The hunt is for product ideas the company can actually take to market.
The point is the room running without you.
Designing the workshop, handing it off, and then designing the artifact that ends it is a complete loop. The team owns the work. Leadership gets a clear read of what was done. The next R&D pass starts with a deliverable instead of a memory.
Empowering a team is a design problem with two parts. The first part is the structure they need to do the work. The second part is the artifact that proves they did. I built both.
Takeaways
- Church & Dwight (Arm & Hammer)
- CPG
- Pet Care
- R&D
- Workshop Design
- Facilitation Handoff
- Editorial Design
- Workshop Strategy
- Team Enablement
- Book Design
- Made By the Collective
- Arm & Hammer Pet Care
- Princeton Workshop Team
- SuperZoo Field Team
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