The Recipe for Accelerated Product Development: Lessons from Hotel Chocolat’s Product Team

 In conversation with Kaizen Institute

Introduction

Hotel Chocolat‘s product development operation is considerably more complex than its retail presence suggests. Behind each seasonal range sits a web of up to 15 specialist teams: chocolatiers, packaging designers, technical experts, creative directors, working in parallel against fixed calendar dates that do not move. Christmas arrives whether the range is ready or not. At the point this work began with Kaizen Institute, the business was attempting to push a growing number of products through a process designed for a smaller, simpler portfolio across an expanding set of markets, including Japan, the United States, and a growing wholesale channel.

Hannah Gledhill joined Hotel Chocolat and spent most of her tenure in the project management team, most recently as Head of Portfolio, focused on how projects connected to wider business strategy. Olivia Harris joined at the end of 2019 as an NPD Project Manager and has since progressed to Senior NPD Project Manager. Between them, they lived through the moment the old way of working stopped being sufficient and led to a shift to something more structured. What their experience makes clear is that in a fast-growing, innovation-driven business, process discipline is not the enemy of creativity. It is what allows creativity to scale.

In this interview, the second in a four-part series recorded in 2021 with Kaizen Institute, Hannah and Olivia reflect on the challenges that made change unavoidable, the new operating model they built, and what a three-month reduction in lead time to market required.

The limits of the old model

What were the main challenges in product development before this work began?

— Hannah

Even in my relatively short time at Hotel Chocolat, the growth had been significant. Just before we began working with Kaizen Institute, it became apparent that we were trying to drive much more innovation with the same group of people and the same processes we had used for years. When we factored in that we were also launching across new markets, Japan, the United States, and growing wholesale channels, that was the moment we realised why things were not moving as quickly as we needed them to.

The pain points were clear. Speed to market needs to improve. We were prone to scope creep: a project would start with a defined brief and quickly become something quite different. And we were treating every product the same way, whether it was a minor tweak to an existing line or something entirely new. Sending a small amendment through the same full process as an innovation, involving the same number of teams, was overkill, and it was why some products were taking far too long.

The complexity of a season

How complex is the product development operation in practice?

— Hannah

It is substantial. A season like Christmas can include up to 70 products, each with multiple components: chocolates, packaging, menus, boxes, and ribbons. That is one of our most challenging seasons to develop. At the other end of the scale, something like Father’s Day is a much smaller range. But we have seasons running year-round, including ranges we have introduced specifically for new markets. White Day, for instance, is a seasonal range developed for Japan that addresses a significant cultural occasion for which we previously had no product.

Beyond the seasonal ranges, we have growing categories: the Velvetiser range, our alcohol range, and a new coffee category. And coordinating all of that sits across up to 15 specialist teams. Each brings genuine expertise: a chocolatier, a packaging specialist, a technical lead, but aligning that many people around a common goal, against a brief with a fixed delivery date, is a genuinely complex project management challenge.

Going virtual

When the pandemic began, how did the team adapt to working virtually?

— Hannah and Olivia

Surprisingly well, in honest terms. Before the pandemic, all our meetings were face-to-face. We tried to get everyone onto the same site, which was a challenge, given that the business operates across multiple locations. When lockdown was announced, we shifted to Microsoft Teams almost overnight. Most of the team had never used it before, but the transition happened quickly.

The timing was fortunate in one respect. We had just completed a Kaizen Institute workshop and were in the process of setting up a physical obeya room, a project control room, in one of our buildings. It had never been used. We converted it to a virtual equivalent almost immediately, using Trello as the shared workspace. As Olivia observed, the removal of physical constraints made certain things easier: getting 20 people onto a call to share updates, regardless of which site they were on, became straightforward in a way it had never been before. The tools we adopted during that period have remained in place since.

A new rhythm

What is the obeya model, and how did it change the rhythm of project management?

— Hannah

The shift was significant. Previously, we had a dedicated meeting that typically ran for at least half a day each week, during which we would work through all active projects in a single session. The obeya principle replaced that with short, focused check-ins, each lasting no more than half an hour, and we now run between 10 and 15 of those sessions each week. Each one is a project status meeting: Is this project on track? If not, what needs to happen to bring it back on track? The detailed development work happens outside the session.

That change in rhythm allowed us to manage the volume of projects we were running during the pandemic. Without it, we would not have been able to deliver what we delivered. The brevity is the point: breaking projects into manageable, visible chunks and reviewing them frequently, rather than trying to fit everything into a single long session once a week.

The stage gate model

How does the stage gate process work, and what changed at the ideation and sign-off stages?

— Hannah

We introduced a stage gate model with seven go/no-go points throughout the development process. Previously, we effectively had one right at the end. Sprinting towards seven checkpoints keeps the pace up in a way that a single endpoint never could, and each gate has a checklist of what the team expects to have seen before moving forward.

The changes at both ends of the process have been the most significant. At ideation, we now require a response to the brief within three to five days of receiving it: a high-level presentation back to the category management team, a mood board, and a rough selection just to confirm we are moving in the right direction before weeks of work begin. That early check-in prevents abortive effort, which had been a real problem before.

At the other end, the commercial sign-off with the executive board has been transformed. In the past, that meeting was often the first time some board members had seen the products, which made last-minute change requests almost inevitable. Now, because we have earlier stage gates where the board is involved, the final sign-off is genuinely a confirmation exercise. We go into that meeting with confidence.

Innovation versus development

What is the distinction between innovation and development, and why does it matter?

— Hannah

Innovation, the way we think about it, is building the catalogue: a library of chocolate recipes, packaging types and finishes that we can draw from. That work can take months or years. Product development, by contrast, draws from the catalogue. If the capability already exists, the project can move through the stage gate model with a degree of certainty about timelines.

The problem before was that we were mixing the two. If a project required factory trials for a new chocolate, a project manager could not accurately predict whether the trials would take three or nine months, because the outcome was unknown. That uncertainty made it very difficult to commit to a launch date with any confidence. Separating innovation from development, doing the exploratory work upstream, before a product enters the development process, is what allows us to say with reasonable certainty when something will be ready.

Changing old habits

What were the hardest habits and processes to change?

— Hannah

Scope creep was the most persistent challenge. As a business, Hotel Chocolat had been accustomed to changing things late in the process, and as the company has grown, the downstream implications of those late changes have become far more significant. The work now is to nail the brief up front: to align as a business on what we want to deliver before the project starts, rather than discovering misalignment halfway through.

The other area we are still working on is the ideation mentality. When teams are generating options to present, there is a tendency to want full commercial accuracy on costings before anything has been decided. The shift is in understanding that costs at the ideation stage need to be accurate enough to support a decision, not fully refined, as refinement comes later. Introducing the stage gate model mid-project, with a live Valentine’s Day range as the pilot, was genuinely difficult. But it demonstrated that the process could hold under pressure, and that is what gave us confidence to extend it.

Key takeaways

Hotel Chocolat’s product development story is, at its core, a story about what happens when growth outpaces process. The team lacked neither capability nor creativity; they had both in abundance. What they lacked was a structure capable of carrying that capability at scale across a growing number of markets, product categories, and specialist teams. The work with Kaizen Institute was not about slowing the business down. It was about building the scaffolding that allowed it to move faster with more confidence.

The specific lessons from Hannah and Olivia’s experience are relevant to any organisation managing complex, multi-team development processes. Separating innovation from development, building the capability catalogue before products enter the pipeline, removes one of the most common sources of timeline unpredictability. Replacing infrequent long reviews with frequent short ones changes what is visible and when. And defining what is out of scope, now that a brief is received, is as important as defining what is in it.

Looking ahead

With the core stage-gate model embedded throughout Hotel Chocolat’s chocolate development operation, attention has turned to extending the same discipline to third-party products: biscuits, alcohol, and other categories manufactured outside the company’s own facilities. Applying a process designed around internal production to an externally dependent supply chain introduces a different set of variables — supplier lead times, external trial cycles, geographic dependencies—and requires adaptation rather than direct replication.

The broader context is one of continued supply chain volatility. Longer lead times from supplier bases, shifting sourcing geographies and the ongoing implications of global disruption mean that the upstream elements of the development process, specifically how far ahead the business plans and what it builds into its stage gate timings, are not fixed. They require continuous revision.

As Hannah Gledhill observed during the conversation:

“There’s always a huge amount to improve, which is, I guess, the whole point of kaizen, but we have to keep improving because the world around us is changing, and you just have to adapt.”

Continue your journey with more episodes of the Hotel Chocolat Webinar series. The conversation continues in Episode 3.

Missed Episode 1? Hear how Hotel Chocolat built the culture behind the process.