Executive summary

Enterprise growth teams often stall because leadership decisions rely on opinions, forecasts, or voice-of-customer interviews alone. In this session, Strategyzer's Alex Osterwalder and Carol Hill joined Honeywell Senior Product Director Maxwell Johnson to show how a Fortune 100 company shifted to evidence-based growth decisions.

Using a five-level evidence framework and structured pre-work playbook, Honeywell replaced slide-deck presentations with business artifacts grounded in customer evidence. The result: faster preparation cycles, sharper leadership conversations, and fewer resources spent on projects that lack real market validation.

The clearest takeaway: what customers say and what they do are fundamentally different – and only "do" evidence reduces investment risk.

Introduction

You have been here before. A team spends weeks polishing a slide deck. They rehearse with stakeholders. They walk into the investment review. And within ten minutes, leadership is grilling them on technical details that have nothing to do with whether the market actually wants the product.

The team leaves deflated. Leadership leaves uncertain. And the project either dies or staggers forward on gut feel.

This is the default mode in most large organisations. Voice of customer gets collected. Business plans get built. But the decision to invest – or kill – still comes down to who tells the most compelling story in the room.

Honeywell decided to change that. Over four growth symposiums across a year-long collaboration with Strategyzer, they built a repeatable system for making growth investment decisions based on evidence, not persuasion. Here is how they did it – and what their teams and leaders learned along the way.

1.Why voice of customer is necessary but not sufficient

Most organisations start their customer evidence journey with voice of customer (VOC). Interviews, surveys, focus groups. Honeywell was no different. As Maxwell Johnson described it, VOC was where their customer evidence began and ended.

The problem is not that VOC is bad. It is that it only tells you what people say. And as Carol Hill put it during the session: "What people say and what people do are two different things."

A thousand customer interviews still only produce level-one evidence on Strategyzer's innovation project scorecard. The volume does not change the category. You are still capturing opinions – not observing behaviour.

This distinction matters because the gap between stated intent and actual behaviour is where most failed products hide. Customers say they want something. Teams build it. The market shrugs.

Watch-out: Teams often confuse the amount of evidence with the quality of evidence. As Alex Osterwalder emphasised: "The numbers don't get you into a different category." Thirty interviews and 300 surveys still sit at level one if all you captured is what people said.

2. The five levels of evidence – from opinion to proof

Strategyzer's innovation project scorecard frames evidence on a zero-to-five scale. Each level reflects a qualitative shift in what you know and how confident you should be:

• Level 0 – Business plans, spreadsheets, and high-level market research with no direct customer input.
• Level 1 – Customer opinions gathered in low-investment settings (interviews, surveys). This is "say" evidence.
• Level 2 – Showing customers an artifact of your value proposition (a mockup, concept board, or prototype) and capturing their reaction.
• Level 3 – Light "do" evidence. Customers take a small action without you prompting them – clicking an ad, responding to a call to action, or coming back unprompted after an initial conversation.
• Level 4 – Significant skin in the game. Co-creation workshops where a client sends their senior leaders, or signed letters of intent.
• Level 5 – Real-world behaviour at scale. Customers experiencing the actual product or service and paying for it, even if the back end is manual (as in a Wizard of Oz test).

Carol Hill illustrated this progression with the Tesla story. Early evidence came from studying competitor customers (level one). The team then built a mashup prototype (level two), launched a landing page with a call to action (level three), ran a presale with $100,000 refundable deposits from early adopters (level four), and eventually saw 325,000 Model 3 reservations in a single week (level five).

The Fireflies.ai example showed that level five does not require mass market scale. Two co-founders manually took meeting notes for 100 paying subscribers before automating. The customers experienced the real value – even though humans, not AI, were delivering it.

Watch-out: Level five does not mean you have validated every aspect of the idea. You may have strong desirability evidence but untested feasibility. The scorecard applies to individual hypotheses, not to the whole business case at once.

3. The say-do gap: where investment risk lives

The difference between level one and level three is not incremental. It is psychological.

Agreeing to fill out a survey is easy. Clicking an online ad requires slightly more intent – as Alex Osterwalder pointed out, you probably never clicked an Instagram ad for something you were not interested in. But putting down a deposit, attending a co-creation workshop, or coming back unprompted weeks later – these are behaviours that reveal genuine demand.

This is the framework Honeywell used to reassess their in-flight projects. Maxwell Johnson described the moment of truth: teams arrived at the growth symposium confident they had plenty of evidence, only to realise their extensive VOC work scored a two on the evidence scale. As he put it: "I've got plenty of evidence. Look at all this VOC I've done. And we're like, okay, that's a two."

That recalibration was uncomfortable but productive. It gave teams a clear picture of where they actually stood – and a plan to close the gap.

4. Replacing slides with business artifacts

One of the most distinctive moves in Honeywell's approach was banning PowerPoint from the growth symposium.

Instead of polished decks, teams prepared five structured business artifacts on the Strategyzer platform:

1. Customer ecosystem map – identifying end users, decision-makers, purchasing departments, and channel partners, then selecting the most important stakeholder for this specific idea.
2. Customer profile – mapping the top jobs, pains, and gains for that key stakeholder.
3. Value scenes – a simple storyboard showing how the project creates value for the customer.
4. Business model and financial prototype – a three-year projection of revenue streams, costs, and required investment. Simple. Not a sprawling spreadsheet.
5. Known unknowns – an explicit map of what the team still does not know.

Maxwell Johnson described how this replaced what he called "shadow pre-work" – weeks of iterating a one-page slide with various stakeholders, only to arrive at the symposium and get challenged on fundamentals.

The artifact-based approach decomposed the preparation into manageable steps that build on each other. Teams got asynchronous feedback from coaches at each stage rather than a waterfall of corrections at the end.

Watch-out: These artifacts look deceptively simple. But that simplicity is the point. It forces teams to answer fundamental business questions – who is the customer, how are we creating value, how are we capturing value – before diving into technical details.

Suggested visual: Place an infographic here showing the five business artifacts in sequence (customer ecosystem map → customer profile → value scenes → business model / financial prototype → known unknowns) with a brief label for each. Format: horizontal process diagram. Designer brief: Show as a left-to-right flow with simple icons for each artifact. Use Strategyzer brand colours. Emphasise that each step builds on the previous one.

5. How the growth symposium presentation worked

At the symposium itself, teams presented directly from their artifacts on the platform – not from slides. The format was tight:

• 30 seconds: The big idea, the customer, how they create value, and the price.
• 1 minute: Top customer jobs, pains, and gains from the customer profile.
• 30 seconds: The evidence supporting their customer understanding, scored against the five levels.
• Value proposition presentation: Value scenes showing how they create value, key differentiators, and again – the evidence.
• Financials: A light business model and financial prototype, supported by evidence.
• Close: Key unknowns still remaining.

This structure gave leaders a shared framework to evaluate projects. Instead of defaulting to technical interrogation, they could ask evidence-based questions: what level of evidence do you have for desirability? For viability? Where are the gaps?

Maxwell Johnson noted a critical shift in leadership behaviour: "The leadership, they're going to grill the teams, whether you like it or not." But without a framework, leaders default to scrutinising the technical solution. The evidence-based format channelled that energy productively. Leaders appreciated it because it structured their feedback. Teams appreciated it because the conversation stayed focused on what matters.

6. The shared language effect

One theme ran through every part of the Honeywell story: shared language.

When teams and leaders use the same vocabulary – customer jobs, pains, gains, levels of evidence, say versus do – the quality of conversation changes. As Maxwell Johnson described it: "It enables a logical conversation between different levels in the organisation."

Technical details still matter. Feasibility questions still need answers. But those conversations happen after the team has demonstrated that a real market need exists. The evidence framework sequences the discussion so the most important questions get addressed first.

This shared language also created cultural momentum beyond the symposium events. Johnson noted that people across the organisation started thinking about evidence differently and exploring ideas before jumping to technical solutions – a shift he credited with "eliminating a lot of our R&D waste."

7. Testing does not mean building a smaller product

A common objection – especially in industries like aerospace or heavy manufacturing – is that "do" evidence is impractical. You cannot build a half-finished aeroplane to test demand.

But this objection misunderstands what testing means in an evidence-based framework. As Alex Osterwalder clarified: "You don't need to test the whole idea."

Testing desirability does not require a working product. Getting a client's CEO to attend a co-creation workshop is level-four "do" evidence for desirability. A customer who comes back to you unprompted weeks after an initial conversation – without you selling – is level-three "do" evidence.

The key insight: you are not testing the entire idea at once. You are testing specific hypotheses about specific aspects – desirability, feasibility, viability – independently. You can reach level five on customer understanding while still at level two on feasibility. That is expected and useful.

Maxwell Johnson added that cycle time determines which experiments to use, not whether to experiment at all. Strategyzer's experiment library helps teams choose methods appropriate to their timeline – whether they are developing a building automation product on a fast cycle or an aerospace project on a longer one.

Conclusion

The shift from opinion-based to evidence-based growth decisions is not a theoretical exercise. Honeywell demonstrated that with structured playbooks, visual business artifacts, and a shared evidence framework, enterprise teams can have sharper investment conversations in less time. The approach works for in-flight projects, not just greenfield ideas. It works across industries and cycle times. The real constraint is not feasibility of testing – it is the willingness to distinguish between what customers say and what they actually do. Start by mapping your current projects against the five evidence levels. The gaps will tell you exactly where to focus next.

Download the slides

Want to revisit the frameworks and examples from this session? Download the full slide deck here.

Explore Strategyzer workshops

If your organisation is making growth investment decisions and you want to bring evidence-based rigour to the process, explore how Strategyzer's workshops and sprints can help – the same format Honeywell used across four growth symposiums.