What was the goal?

IIDF, a leading operator of corporate innovation and acceleration programs, was executing a product transformation mandate with one of the largest CIS banks. The initiative had two core goals: strengthening product management skills across the bank’s team, and creating strategic alignment with C-level executives on transformation objectives.

IIDF partnered with B5 Research to design and facilitate practice-oriented workshops for product teams, and to conduct structured in-depth C-level interviews to map an existing product development framework.

Solution:

1. Workshops design and preparation. Leveraging prior experience in corporate education formats, B5 Research co-developed theoretical frameworks and practical exercises tailored to the bank’s product teams, ensuring clear take-aways and immediate applicability.
   ‍
2. Hands-on execution. We delivered interactive workshops for 50+ participants per session, engaging new product managers, analysts, and marketing specialists. The sessions focused on early validation methods, rapid hypothesis testing, and practical tools for integrating customer insights into product development.
   ‍
3. Management alignment. Together with IIDF, we created structured interview scripts and facilitated deep-dive discussions with multiple vice-presidents and chief officers, capturing how product development frameworks were currently operating inside the bank and identifying systemic bottlenecks.

Results:

The collaboration between IIDF, the CIS bank, and B5 Research delivered tangible outcomes at both the operational and strategic level:

1. Product skills growth. Workshops measurably strengthened the bank’s internal capabilities in early validation and hypothesis testing, enabling teams to reduce costs of experimentation and shorten the path from idea to customer.
   ‍
2. Full process audit. Structured dialogues with executives provided a complete map of existing product development inter-dependencies, frameworks, and bottlenecks, giving transparency on where transformation could create the most value.
   ‍
3. Actionable transformation strategy. Insights from workshops and executive interviews fed directly into IIDF’s transformation program design, one that avoided disruptive “big-bang” changes and instead introduced targeted modifications with outsized impact on efficiency and outcomes.

Summing up

By combining hands-on training for product teams with strategic alignment at the executive level, B5 Research and IIDF created a dual-track impact: building day-to-day product competencies while informing a transformation strategy rooted in real-world processes. The result was a bank better equipped to validate ideas early, reduce wasted resources, and scale transformation with executive buy-in.