Background

The Scale-up Playbook needed to capture deep, experience-led insight from senior subject matter experts across product, strategy, and transformation. Previous approaches relied heavily on individual interviews and isolated writing tasks, which risked producing siloed perspectives and overly theoretical guidance. The challenge was to surface real-world experience, disagreement, and nuance — while working within tight time constraints.

Solution

Rather than defaulting to a series of 1:1 interviews, the team adopted a facilitated roundtable format. Key internal experts were brought together in a single, structured session designed to encourage debate and idea-sharing.

The discussion was moderated like a panel or “TV show”, with strict timeboxing to keep momentum and ensure all voices were heard. A prioritised question set ensured that the most critical topics were covered, with a deliberate focus on tangible outputs — such as the artefacts organisations create when they’ve successfully addressed scaling challenges.

Crucially, the conversation was steered towards real client anecdotes rather than abstract best practice. Follow-up 1:1 interviews were used selectively, only where deeper expertise on a specific topic emerged. Sessions were recorded and transcribed to preserve tone, language, and nuance in the final material.

Results

This approach produced richer, more grounded content in significantly less time. The roundtable format surfaced friction points, disagreements, and practical examples that would not have emerged through linear interviews alone. The resulting Playbook content reflected lived experience — sounding credible, specific, and genuinely useful to scaling businesses, rather than generic or theoretical.