From fragmented initiatives to a shared direction, Kotori

The situation

Svenska Mässan was working to improve its digital platform for exhibitors. The platform plays an important role in how exhibitors book, manage, and get value from their participation, and the experience around it has a direct connection to the organisation's broader commercial relationships.

By the time I joined, the work had evolved over several phases. Substantial investment had already been made, including in new tools. Teams in product, commercial, marketing, and operations were each pressing on different priorities, and nobody had drawn those together. Investment was moving faster than the shared understanding of what it was for.

The exhibitor experience sits at the centre of one of Svenska Mässan's most important commercial relationships. That made the absence of a shared direction a commercial problem, not just an internal one.

How I read this

The organisation was largely describing this as a technology problem. The tools, implementation choices, and system fit were all part of the discussion. But that framing risked making technology decisions carry too much of the burden before the underlying needs had been made explicit.

What I saw was a broader alignment challenge. Needs, pain points, and goals had not yet been brought together into one shared analysis. People across product, commercial, marketing, and operations each had a coherent view of their part of the problem. Nobody had put those views next to each other. The technology questions were real, but they were symptoms of a missing common understanding.

The useful question was not only which technology to use. It was what problem the technology needed to solve.

What I did

Created the shared picture first

I mapped the stakeholder landscape, decision-makers, ways of working, pain points, and unspoken priorities before changing the roadmap or touching delivery plans.

Protected the work from premature implementation

Development and change management were held until senior stakeholders and management had reached a common view of needs and priorities.

Built a structure the organisation could continue to run

Existing technical decisions were treated as constraints to understand, while digital priorities were connected directly to business goals and shaped into a roadmap the organisation could continue to run.

Outcome

Svenska Mässan arrived at a shared, prioritised roadmap after a long period of fragmented progress, and reached it in eight months.

Stakeholders with different perspectives aligned on a common view of needs and priorities.
Leadership gained clarity on where the organisation was heading and why, including a clearer view of how existing tool choices related to the needs that had now been surfaced.
The organisation left the engagement with a structured approach to its digital products and assets: a foundation for prioritisation and governance that had not existed before.

Why this pattern matters

The easy path would have been to continue from where the work had left off. The systems had been selected, assumptions had been made, and progress had already been invested. Momentum pointed forward.

Resisting that meant telling senior stakeholders directly that the work on priorities was not done. Each of them had a list. Nobody had sat in a room and put those lists next to each other. That was the missing step, and it required convincing people who had already spent time and money that spending more time on fundamentals was not going backwards.

The sunk cost was a persistent friction. The time already invested did not mean the goal was closer. And the outcome itself was not fixed. Dates would shift, scope would change, and new information would reshape the roadmap. For an organisation not accustomed to working this way, that uncertainty felt like a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be managed.

The roadmap that emerged was built on actual shared priorities, not assumed ones. That made it more durable than what had come before, but getting there required the organisation to sit with more ambiguity than it was comfortable with.