Client Story - Rethinking Risk in Manufacturing
Darren Stoddart - Former Sr. Director of Innovation at Behr
How Darren Stoddart Rewired Decision-Making with Precoil
When Darren Stoddart was leading innovation at Behr, the company had made a bold move, to detach an innovation function from the core business.
The goal was clear. Get further ahead in the market. Work on opportunities that were riskier, less defined, and further from the core.
But there was a structural tension.
The internal gatekeeping process hadn’t changed.
Behr was (and is) a manufacturing company. That means long development cycles, traditional Stage-Gate governance, and a deeply embedded risk-averse culture. Innovation ideas might have been new, but the judgment process they would eventually face was not.
Darren knew something had to change.
The Core Challenge: Moving Faster Inside a Risk-Averse System
Manufacturing operates on 18–24 month development timelines. Software teams, by contrast, iterate weekly.
Darren was looking for a way to bridge those worlds.
He didn’t want to abandon rigor. He wanted to de-risk ideas before they reached formal judgment, so they wouldn’t get killed prematurely, or worse, funded blindly.
He needed a way for a front-end innovation team inside a manufacturing firm to behave more like a high-velocity software team.
That’s when we started working together.
Bridging Stage-Gate and Lean Thinking
For years, product development in manufacturing revolved around Stage-Gate. In software, Agile dominated. Around that time, Lean Startup was beginning to connect those two worlds.
Darren saw the potential, but needed help operationalizing it.
Together, we built a bridge:
Applying rapid experimentation to physical product concepts
Using lightweight consumer validation instead of defaulting to expensive traditional research
Running faster cycles of learning before ideas hit executive scrutiny
The goal wasn’t speed for speed’s sake.
It was structured risk reduction.
Changing How Decisions Were Made
Inside Behr’s newly formed incubator, there was no established decision-making structure. No precedent. No built-in filters.
Ideas could move forward based on instinct, history, or gut feel. Or they could stall because traditional research was too slow and expensive to support the pace the team wanted.
That created a dangerous gap.
Instead of relying on hunches or large research budgets, Darren’s team began:
Connecting directly with consumers in affordable, scrappy ways
Running rapid tests to validate assumptions
Identifying and documenting the real risks behind each idea
Killing weak concepts earlier, before they consumed serious resources
The shift was profound.
Rather than modeling opportunity alone, the team began surfacing exposure: What had to be true? What risks were we carrying? What evidence did we actually have?
By the time ideas were exposed to the broader organization, the conversation had changed.
Instead of saying:
“We think this is a good idea.”
They could say:
“We’ve tested the critical assumptions. Here’s what we’ve learned. Here’s the remaining risk. This is why it’s worth pursuing.”
That is decision infrastructure.
Cutting More Ideas, Earlier
One of the biggest changes Darren described was internal.
They started cutting more ideas, faster.
Not because they became pessimistic, but because they became evidence-driven.
Weak concepts didn’t survive long enough to create political friction or waste meaningful capital. Stronger ideas entered executive review already de-risked.
That dramatically improved both velocity and credibility.
Beyond Process: Building Confidence
Darren’s reflection wasn’t just about tools or frameworks.
He shared that the work changed how he thinks about decisions and risk. It shaped his working style. It gave him confidence not only in that role, but in the decisions he’s made since.
In his words, it wasn’t just about capability. It was about partnership.
There are many skilled consultants in the world. Fewer combine structured expertise with the ability to help leaders evolve how they think.
The Takeaway
For organizations separating innovation from the core:
You cannot move faster if your decision system stays the same.
You cannot pursue riskier bets without structured de-risking.
You cannot rely on instinct when governance demands evidence.
At Behr, the transformation wasn’t about abandoning Stage-Gate.
It was about building a front-end system that made smarter bets before Stage-Gate ever began.
That shift, from gut feel to tested assumptions, is what turns innovation from theater into disciplined strategic investment.
Transcript
00:00:11 Speaker 1 (David J Bland)
So can you explain a little bit about how we work together and why you brought me in to help you?
00:00:17 Speaker 2 (Darren Stoddart)
Yeah, so I was at Behr at the time and the business had decided
that they needed to detach an innovation function from the core of the business to try to get further ahead in the market and to work on things that were a little riskier and a little bit more difficult to define and understand.
And with that, I knew that the internal gatekeeping structure was still fundamentally the same and they were risk averse in the way that they were risk averse.
So what was going to need to happen is as we develop these things that were further out, we would need to find a way to de-risk them prior to hitting that point of judgment.
And I was looking for somebody that had experience in a world that I wasn't in, specifically around software and a mentality that went along with the rapid iterations that happen in that world versus what happens in a manufacturing world where you might have an 18 to 24 month development time.
00:01:24 Speaker 1 (David J Bland)
Thank you.
Can you explain how working with me impacted your work or how you thought about decisions or how you thought about risk?
00:01:38 Speaker 2 (Darren Stoddart)
Yeah, I mean, I think that working with you profoundly changed me and changed my working style.
So for many, many years, people would talk about Stagegate as the product development methodology for a manufacturing firm.
And they would talk about things like Agile as the way to develop software.
And then the lean startup thing kind of happened around the time that you and I got to know each other.
And that started to form a bridge to me that, okay, there's parts and pieces of the way software is done that can be applied to the way physical products are developed.
And you helped me get that.
And you helped me build that bridge that allowed a front end of innovation in a manufacturing firm to behave more like something that works at a pace 10 times faster.
00:03:00 Speaker 1 (David J Bland)
How did this impact your decision making or how you decide what to invest in and what not to invest in or did it at all?
00:03:07 Speaker 2 (Darren Stoddart)
Yeah, I mean, I think that working with you, David, and Precoil did change everything about decision-making.
And the way that it happened internal to that incubation or idea advancement team that I described was that we didn't have a decision-making structure because it was a brand new entity.
So there was nothing that said this is a good idea or it was a bad idea other than traditional research or instinct or history or hunches or gut feelings or all that other sort of stuff.
And funding traditional research for the velocity that we wanted to work at was a complete non-starter.
So inside of the incubator, finding ways to connect with consumers more affordably than hiring traditional research for them to go out and do a voice of customer storage of stuff for us.
And enabling us to do more of that ourselves, even at a low level, hiring out the bigger stuff when we needed to was a piece of that.
The other piece of that is the rapid testing that would allow us to, once again, when it was going to get exposed to the larger organization, say,
We've made a decision that this is worth pursuing.
Here's why we believe it's true, not just because our ability to model what the opportunity might have been, but to figure out what the risks associated with it were going to be.
So once again, internal decision making totally different in that we were killing more faster before it would even get to some larger group for judgment.
00:04:51 Speaker 1 (David J Bland)
Thank you.
Anything else you want to share or anything you can think of or?
00:08:06 Speaker 2 (Darren Stoddart)
But one thing that I really want to share is that there are lots of people that can be hired to do lots of things.
And sometimes you find people that have amazing capabilities and that's wonderful and you can learn A lot.
And sometimes you find people with amazing capabilities and knowledge that are also amazing people.
And I really feel like that's what I found when you and I started working together.
You were a person that was perfectly pleasant and professional at all times and helped me develop my thinking and helped me help my company at the time.
And helped me have confidence with with many things I've done since then.
So it's not just your skills and experience that I appreciate.
It is also you.
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