Building Discover + Design at Starbucks

Starbucks had the ambition to innovate faster and more meaningfully, but the organization needed a stronger internal capability to support that ambition.

Teams were facing complex questions across digital, loyalty, ordering, delivery, store experience, beverage, new retail concepts, sustainability, and future growth. The opportunities were meaningful, but early-stage work often required stronger structure, deeper customer understanding, sharper problem framing, faster experimentation, and better cross-functional alignment before teams could confidently move toward funding and execution.

The opportunity was not simply to support individual projects. It was to build a new internal innovation capability that could help teams turn ambiguous business questions into clearer concepts, decisions, and pathways forward.

The organization had strong ambition, talented teams, and no shortage of ideas. But innovation work was often fragmented.

Different teams approached discovery differently. Some moved quickly to solutions before fully understanding the customer, problem, or strategic context. Others had promising ideas but lacked the structure, language, or methods to test them and align stakeholders before large investments were made.

The challenge was to create a capability that gave teams a repeatable way to:

• Shape real customer-facing innovation across digital and physical experiences.
• Help leaders move from opinion-led debate to evidence-informed decisions.
• Bring human-centered rigor to ambiguous business questions.
• Provide teams a shared language and method for discovery.
• Enable rapid experimentation to test, learn, and de-risk promising ideas quickly.
• Scale beyond a small group of practitioners into a broader organizational muscle.

Andrew built, led, and scaled Discover + Design as a human-centered strategy, innovation, and insights capability at Starbucks, establishing the team, charter, portfolio, methods, and operating model with talented teammates, senior leaders, and cross-functional partners.

The work evolved from hands-on practice into enterprise capability building: embedding with teams, guiding a portfolio of complex, early-stage opportunities, training employees, advising leaders, and establishing a more disciplined approach to discovery, design, and rapid experimentation.

The role was not only to deliver innovation work. It was to build the organizational vehicle—the people, practices, portfolio, and operating rhythms—that allowed more of that work to happen across the enterprise.

Discover + Design became a highly sought-after engine for helping teams move through ambiguity with more clarity, creativity, speed, and discipline.

The work included several essential moves:

• Created a shared way of working.
  Human-centered design methods were introduced and adapted for the realities of a large enterprise, giving teams a more consistent way to frame problems, understand people, generate ideas, and test solutions.
• Embedded with teams at important moments.
  Rather than operating only as a distant internal consultancy or a training group, Discover + Design embedded within teams working on meaningful business challenges, helping bring structure, speed, and human-centered thinking to work that mattered.
• Built internal capability.
  Trained and supported employees in human-centered methods so the organization could build fluency, confidence, and repeatable ways of working.
• Made ideas tangible quickly.
  Translated opportunities into concepts, prototypes, storyboards, and other artifacts that helped teams move beyond abstract discussion and see possibilities more clearly before committing to a direction.
• Created a stronger rapid learning system.
  Rapid experimentation became a more disciplined way to validate ideas, reduce uncertainty, and help leaders make smarter bets with greater confidence before scaling investment.
• Helped ideas move toward market.
  The capability helped shape and advance a broad portfolio of customer-facing innovation work, with particular depth in digital experiences and additional influence across physical experience concepts, store formats, pickup, ordering, and personalization.

Discover + Design gave Starbucks a new internal strategy, innovation, and insights capability for moving ambiguous opportunities toward action.

The group supported more than 55 projects across 25+ teams, trained more than 350 employees, and helped leaders and teams approach complex opportunities with greater clarity, structure, speed, and confidence.

Just as importantly, the capability helped shape a broad portfolio of customer-facing innovations across ordering, delivery, loyalty, store experience, beverage, new retail concepts, sustainability, and future growth. This was not a theoretical capability. Multiple initiatives launched or advanced as the work informed direction, accelerated learning, reduced risk, and gave teams a repeatable way to move from ambiguity to action.

What began as a set of practices used by a small group became a broader organizational capability: a team, portfolio, and operating system for exploring, testing, aligning, and advancing important work with greater discipline, imagination, and practical business impact.