Mattel Future Lab was established in 2022 in response to shifting consumer behavior as digital play was reshaping the industry. When I joined the team that summer to lead Creative, there were already 30 innovative concepts either in development or waiting to be moved out of the backlog. For a small team still trying to get its bearings, this was not a setup for success. It was clear we needed a framework to prioritize which projects got attention first.
The hard truth is not every idea is a great idea. No matter how much passion and creativity and cleverness is behind an innovative concept, the odds are something will emerge during development that can shut the whole thing down. I’ve seen highly skilled teams have projects killed after months of work for reasons that could have been surfaced in Week Two. This can be a devastating blow to morale, and it’s a setback for the business when funds have already been spent.
As I thought about those situations, I saw a commonality across all the projects that had been shelved. The reason tended to fall into one of three categories – Consumer response (it didn’t test as well as we’d hoped), Technical complexity (the technology required to deliver the experience wasn’t mature enough), or Financial requirements (the cost of development was higher than anticipated). What if we could validate these things earlier in the process before time, money, and talent had already been expended?
Drawing from the principles of Design Thinking and the Agile framework, I designed a solution which we called The Future Lab Way. The goal was to validate the desirability, feasibility, and viability of a new idea in 4–6 weeks.
To achieve this, we established the Discovery team: cross-functional pods made up of a Creative Lead, a Product/Business Lead, and a Tech Lead. Each pod was responsible for running a concept through a short series of sprints in which they would build and test lo-fi prototypes, determine which tech solution and/or partners we needed, and model out a first pass scalable business plan. At key moments throughout the sprints, the pods would consult with Global Consumer Insights, Finance, and the Global Brand teams to ensure transparency.
We officially kicked things off in January of 2025. We set an aggressive goal of running 20 concepts through the process, knowing that volume was necessary to surface two worth betting on. By the end of the year, we not only met our goal, we exceeded it by 30%.