Bevi Innovation & Technology Culture

What new technologies or frameworks are helping your teams move faster and build smarter?

Like many teams and companies, we’ve been leaning hard into AI as a working tool in support of each of my teams’ goals. Over the past few months, we’ve rolled out role-based AI enablement designed around how our product managers, product marketers, physical and digital designers and researchers actually spend their time. That’s been important because the opportunity looks different across each of these disciplines and generic training rarely changes how people work day to day. We’re also evolving the way we structure product development, or “how we build,” with a greater focus on validating ideas before committing full execution resources. The goal is to spend less time creating documents about what might work and more time building, testing and learning what actually does — especially when it comes to thinking about our next generation machines and beverages, which we formulate in house.

How do you balance experimentation with reliability in your development process?

Specifically on the digital and software side of my team, the cost of experimentation can be relatively low and the feedback loop is fast. Our squad model gives teams like the one working on our drinker experience (the “Bevi screen”) the ability to test ideas quickly and use real behavior to inform where to focus. We select certain sites to test at and rapidly get feedback to figure out the best way to pivot or persevere with features. It isn’t lost on me that the Bevi screen is a critical part of how someone interacts with a Bevi machine every day. This touchpoint IS our product for our drinkers. That means the reliability bar changes significantly as an idea gets closer to the customer. Early exploration should be fast, flexible and learning focused. Once a feature is ready to go live, the process becomes more rigorous. Our stage gates intentionally get tighter as the cost and impact of failure increase. And we’re getting both quantitative and qualitative feedback on anything we’re pushing out to help us get better every day.

What role does collaboration play in turning innovative ideas into products? 

I know it may be cliché, but collaboration is everything. A new Bevi beverage never comes together within one function alone. It takes product, beverage science, program management and manufacturing working from the same table. A flavor that meets key requirements and claims and tastes great in the lab also has to be manufacturable at scale and resonate with real customers. Our process starts with in-house tastings where those teams come together to pressure-test ideas early. That helps us surface roadblocks before we are deep into development — such as identifying whether something will be difficult to scale, does not fit the product line, or simply is not delivering the experience we intended. From there, we take the most promising ideas into the field and taste them with real customers. That gives us a much clearer signal on what has potential before we commit the resources required to fully build it out. That tight loop between cross-functional judgment and real-world feedback is what helps us move quickly without relying on assumptions.