New Growth Engines

Starbucks was looking beyond incremental innovation and asking a larger strategic question: where might the next meaningful engines of growth come from?

The company had extraordinary brand reach, deep customer relationships, and a strong core business. But as a mature global enterprise, future growth could not depend only on refining what already existed. Leaders needed a more disciplined way to explore larger, more expansive moonshot opportunities.

There was no shortage of ambition. The challenge was turning that ambition into something structured enough to evaluate, discuss, and move forward.

Big ideas were already present in executive conversations, but they were often fragmented, informal, and underdeveloped.

Without a clear process, promising ideas could remain abstract. The loudest or most familiar perspectives could shape the conversation, while equally valuable possibilities stayed hidden or unresolved.

The work required a process that could help senior executives:

• Think expansively beyond the current portfolio and comfortable adjacencies.
• Safely challenge assumptions about the brand, the business, and future growth.
• Turn early-stage ideas into tangible opportunity concepts that could be evaluated and advanced.

Andrew led the engagement in partnership with the Discover + Design team, designing and facilitating a structured executive growth process.

The initial engagement focused on helping a senior leadership team generate, shape, and prioritize new opportunity spaces. After the first engagement created momentum and confidence, the work expanded to the CEO and executive leadership team.

The role was to create the conditions for expansive thinking without losing strategic discipline: shaping the process, facilitating key moments, partnering with a co-facilitator and team, synthesizing themes, and translating raw ideas into clearer opportunity concepts.

The engagement was designed as a fast, structured sprint that balanced creativity with rigor.

The work was not simply about generating a large volume of ideas. It was about helping leaders move from instinct to shared clarity, and from broad possibility to credible opportunity spaces.

The process included a few essential moves:

• Build creative confidence. The work began by helping leaders quickly activate their own creative instincts and move beyond familiar ideas or default assumptions.
• Generate a wider field of possibilities. Structured exercises helped expand the range of potential growth directions, creating space for ideas that might not surface in a typical executive discussion.
• Synthesize strategic themes. Ideas were clustered into clearer patterns, helping leaders see where individual concepts pointed toward larger opportunity spaces.
• Prioritize what mattered most. The group moved from broad exploration toward a more focused set of opportunities with enough strategic potential to warrant further exploration.
• Make ideas tangible. Prioritized opportunities were developed into structured concept artifacts that brought together narrative, external signals, strategic rationale, brand fit, and key considerations.

The work helped turn a fragmented set of growth ideas into a more credible and actionable set of future opportunity spaces.

Across the engagement, senior leaders generated more than 200 ideas, developed 27 structured opportunity concepts, and identified 2 priority opportunities for further exploration by appropriate internal teams.

More importantly, the process gave senior executives a shared way to move from expansive ambition to disciplined action. The organization left not only with inspiration, but with tangible concepts, clearer priorities, and a stronger foundation for evaluating future growth opportunities.