Skip to content
English
Contact us
  • There are no suggestions because the search field is empty.

What are the roles for a New Product Blueprinting team?

Five key roles support successful New Product Blueprinting—from organizational sponsorship and project leadership to team participation and expert coaching. Understanding each role helps ensure clear expectations, strong project ownership, and effective adoption of the proce

New Product Blueprinting involves five distinct roles, each with a different responsibility for helping the organization adopt the process and successfully complete individual projects. Some roles focus on organizational support and sponsorship, while others are directly involved in project execution or methodology guidance. Understanding these distinctions is important, particularly because several of the roles work closely together but carry different levels of ownership and accountability.

Company Sponsor

The Company Sponsor is the business leader responsible for bringing New Product Blueprinting into the organization as a core innovation process. This role may sit within a variety of functions, but is most often filled by an executive or someone responsible for strengthening the company’s innovation capabilities, methods, or processes.

The Company Sponsor typically plays an important role in launching the effort by building organizational support, securing resources, and helping establish training and initial projects. They may or may not be directly involved in overseeing individual New Product Blueprinting projects.

Unlike the Project Sponsor, whose focus is on the success of a specific project, the Company Sponsor’s primary responsibility is organizational adoption and change management. Their role is to help New Product Blueprinting gain traction, build credibility, and become part of how the organization approaches innovation over time.

Project Sponsor

The Project Sponsor is the business leader with a vested interest in the results of a specific New Product Blueprinting project. Because the customer insights generated by the project are intended to support their business, strategy, or decision-making, the Project Sponsor provides leadership oversight and helps ensure the project remains aligned with its stated objectives.

The Project Sponsor may or may not participate in New Product Blueprinting training or in the day-to-day project work. However, they should remain in close communication with the Team Leader, provide guidance when needed, help remove barriers, and ensure the project continues to address the right business objectives within the agreed-upon timeline.

Team Leader

The Team Leader serves as the Project Manager for the New Product Blueprinting project. They are responsible for keeping the project moving, coordinating the team’s work, and ensuring the project is completed successfully and meets its internal goals. While other Team Members contribute throughout the process, the Team Leader owns the project and is accountable for seeing it through to completion.

The Team Leader should generally also be a direct “customer” of the insights the project will generate. In other words, the customer understanding developed through New Product Blueprinting should be something they need as part of their normal responsibilities—whether they are shaping a product, setting priorities, making investment decisions, or developing a market strategy.

When this is the case, New Product Blueprinting is not simply additional work layered onto their existing responsibilities. It is a proven, structured methodology for accomplishing work they already need to do, while producing stronger customer insight and greater confidence in the decisions that follow.

Team Members

Team Members participate in executing the New Product Blueprinting project under the leadership of the Team Leader. Their level of involvement may vary considerably depending on their role, availability, and the needs of the project—from active participation in customer interviews and analysis to more limited involvement as a contributor or observer.

The strongest Team Members are those who are interested not only in contributing to the project, but also in learning New Product Blueprinting and developing their own skills as practitioners. Teams often benefit from including people with diverse functional perspectives, such as product management, engineering, marketing, sales, and other roles that can contribute to understanding customers and acting on the insights generated.

AIM Coach

Each New Product Blueprinting team is assigned an AIM Coach who serves as the team’s subject matter expert and guide for the Blueprinting process. The AIM Coach helps the team understand and apply the methodology, provides structure and guidance as the project progresses, and may help establish the initial meeting cadence and project rhythm.

Because the AIM Coach is closely involved and often facilitates key activities, they can sometimes appear to be managing the project. However, project ownership remains with the Team Leader. The AIM Coach is not the project manager and is not responsible for coordinating all project activities, driving internal follow-up, or ensuring the project is completed on schedule.

The AIM Coach’s role is to help the team apply New Product Blueprinting effectively and successfully. The Team Leader’s role is to lead the project and ensure it gets completed. The two work closely together, but their responsibilities are intentionally different.