Context
Mercedes-Benz commissioned a full-day innovation workshop for their leadership and product team in Spain, focused on the 2035 customer journey. The brief came through The Bridge School. The day brought together ~30 participants from across the organisation to explore how transformative forces — autonomous driving, electrification, platform models, sustainability — would reshape the way customers discover, buy, use, and end ownership of a car.
Problem
The automotive industry is facing simultaneous disruption across hardware, software, and services. Mercedes-Benz needed to move their team beyond incremental thinking and get concrete about what the customer journey looks like in 2035 — and what that means for the business today. The challenge was not just inspiration but actionable output: teams needed to leave with a concrete initiative they could take forward.
My role
I co-designed and led the full day as lead facilitator, working with sector experts in mobility, energy, and sustainability. I structured the agenda, developed the frameworks used in the workshop, ran the morning keynote session, and facilitated the afternoon design sprint and Shark Tank-style pitch session. I also developed the supporting materials including the Journey Canvas 2035 and the Horizons Framework.
Approach
The day was split into two halves. The morning built a shared foundation: projecting the current Mercedes customer journey, presenting cases of industries that had reinvented theirs (Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb), then unpacking five disruptive forces through external examples — Power Shift, Code on Wheels, Beyond Ownership, Freedom on Demand, and Green Loop. A live-voting session on the 2035 customer profile closed the morning with a shared point of view.
The afternoon shifted to creation. Teams were divided across three work horizons — Car-as-a-Product, Car-as-a-Platform, and Car-as-a-Service — and worked through a structured design sprint to build a Journey Canvas 2035, then develop a single moonshot initiative. Teams pitched Shark Tank-style to a panel of Mercedes management, with live audience voting on the most audacious, most viable, and most customer-centric concepts.
A key element of the afternoon was hands-on AI prototyping. Teams used AI tools to build tangible outputs within the session: landing pages for their concepts, interactive prototypes, and short explainer videos presenting the service to the investor panel. Most participants had no prior experience with AI tools — the session was designed so that this was not a barrier, and the majority were able to produce working prototypes by the end of the day.
Outcome
- 3 teams developed concrete 2035 initiatives pitched to Mercedes management
- Each team delivered a landing page, prototype, and explainer video built with AI tools within the session
- Large majority of participants had no prior AI experience yet produced tangible, presentable outputs on the day
