Geoff is particularly interested in the two journeys every product business has to run—the product itself and the operational capability behind it—and what it takes to make both succeed.

We spoke to Geoff as he prepares to launch his own business, MOJO, which helps organisations navigate these demanding, often vulnerable, phases of their lifecycle.

Here’s our conversation.

Geoff, let's start with what a launch actually is. There's more to it than the industry tends to talk about.

Launches are traditionally treated as an event, almost like a phase gate in a programme. Have we got the parts, do they fit together, can we build the product? But a launch is bigger than that. It is really a measure of organisational health: the ability to deliver.

What's critical for a good launch is a business's ability to solve problems quickly, align teams properly, make decisions efficiently and create momentum when pressure rises. It is the moment when cross-functional working demands shoot up. After months or years of vertical thinking, everyone internally and externally needs to start operating horizontally.

The businesses that get launches right are the ones that treat readiness as something built over time, not a final push close to launch day. The work that makes a launch land well usually happens long before launch day itself. Good ones are built through preparation, not necessarily complicated preparation, just the right preparation for the phase the business is actually in. That distinction matters.

The trap many engineering-led businesses fall into is underestimating the second journey.

What do you mean by that?

Engineering-led businesses are usually exceptionally good at designing products. You can put brilliant engineers in a room and they will create something technically outstanding. But the second journey a business has to go on is operational readiness: the capability to deliver consistently, repeatedly and at the right scale.

That operational side needs planning, systems, ownership and resource in exactly the same way the product itself does. What I see is two patterns.

Some businesses tell themselves, 'we'll just get on with it,' and the foundations don't quite get built in time. Quality, supply chain and shareholder confidence then all sit downstream of that, and the consequences go beyond the launch itself. The numbers underpinning the business case start to wobble, and the credibility of the investment can be drawn into question.

Others do the opposite. They build infrastructure, governance and operational capability for the business they hope to become one day, rather than the business they need to be now. That brings its own challenges. Cash gets burned, internal focus gets diluted and inefficiency gets baked in before the business is ready to absorb it. The balance between the two is the art.

So size and scale can become a problem?

Yes absolutely. In start-ups, scale is one of those words people use very casually, but scaling badly creates enormous problems. I've seen businesses build systems for the company they hope to be in three years' time, rather than the company they need to be for the next six months.

The line I keep coming back to is this: scale is not capability. Scale, by definition, just means a change in size. That gets translated into success being measured by team size, onboarding metrics, system reach, complexity. Capability is different. It is the ability to actually deliver, repeatedly, at the level the business needs right now. Creating the conditions for capability takes a different kind of leadership and a different methodology to what you need in a mature operation.

What I find interesting is that businesses which involve operational teams in product development too late tend to inherit a particular set of problems at launch. The operational mindset arrives after the decisions that mattered most have already been made.

What does good launch readiness look like in practice?

A lot of it comes down to clarity in the right areas. Ownership, stakeholder alignment, escalation routes, expectations. A launch needs to feel right as well as behave correctly from an operational and data perspective. It also depends hugely on external stakeholders, who need to be on board and managed just as closely as the internal ones.

One of the biggest issues during launch is what I call 'white space': the gaps between departments. Engineering, procurement, manufacturing and quality might all be individually strong, but when something goes wrong, who owns it? Who owns the process of solving it? If that isn't crystal clear, businesses lose enormous amounts of time.

Good launch environments create systems that support momentum and reduce ambiguity. Reaction times are quicker. Feedback loops are tighter. The organisation becomes proactive rather than reactive.

The metrics change too. The ones you monitor during steady-state operations are often completely different to the ones you need during launch. In steady state, metrics are collated for reports, the reports are used for escalation, and action follows. In launch, data and systems have to work much more structurally. Change management discipline and issue resolution are where focus has to sit.

You need much higher-resolution visibility around change, supply chain maturity, open issues, parts readiness, escalation times and problem resolution. In a mature business you might review supplier status weekly. In launch you might review it daily, sometimes by shift. You are effectively zooming into the business at a much higher magnification.

This is where I now think of launch as being a state of capability, not a point in time, where everything needs to work and do what’s right for the business at that time.

Is launch different in start-ups compared to established OEMs?

Yes. In an established OEM, a launch is generally about getting a product into production. In a start-up, you are launching two things at the same time: the product and the business itself. That creates a very different kind of pressure. OEMs continually improve their systems, of course, but they are not building them from scratch.

In start-ups you need people believing in the long-term vision, otherwise confidence wavers and the organisation loses its rhythm. At the same time, the business has to deliver operationally and financially over the next six months, and that tension creates difficult decisions.

Teams are often trying to build for the future and get the first products out of the door at the same time. That is why there needs to be much more focus on right-sized operational thinking. Not under-building, not over-building. Building what the business needs for the phase it is in, while proving operational credibility along the way.

What about mature businesses that need to increase output or deliver more efficiently. Is this like a launch?

Scaling and capability increase have very similar requirements to a launch. It is about synchronisation, rhythm, clarity and being prepared for the issues you can predict and the ones you can't.

Internal teams are often torn between new initiatives and existing priorities. How the initiative is framed, what value it delivers, how it lands across the organisation, all of that matters. There are usually people with detailed knowledge and good ideas who, in their normal role, can't deploy them. Any meaningful change initiative is ultimately about changing the way people operate across the whole organisation, and that cross-functional thinking is where most org structures struggle. The white space problem again.

You wrote in a recent LinkedIn post that 'a way that works is not as niche as sectors think.' Tell us what you mean.

People in automotive, defence, rail, aerospace or maritime will often argue their industry is unique. And yes, the products, regulations and delivery environments are different.

But when you've worked across those environments, you realise the systems behind successful delivery are remarkably consistent. Issue and change management, procurement, release systems, operational governance, stakeholder alignment. The fundamentals repeat themselves across industries.

That is where the name MOJO comes from. Years ago, reflecting on some challenging launches we'd lived through, a couple of seasoned colleagues and I were talking about how, if you ignore certain operational fundamentals, risk just gets pushed further down the timeline. The issues are universal, but they tend to feel sector-specific from the inside. We joked that this was 'the mojo of launch.' The patterns repeat themselves almost everywhere; they just show up at different points and in different vocabularies.

The cross-fertilisation between industries is enormously valuable. Some of the best ideas I've seen in automotive could apply directly in defence. Approaches from project-led environments could improve OEM thinking significantly. These industries have more in common than is sometimes appreciated.

You've worked inside some very different businesses. What are some examples of things you've seen done particularly well?

Different businesses get different things right.

At McLaren, the expectation-setting was exceptionally strong. The organisation understood exactly how leadership expected engineering and production to operate. Standards and delivery expectations were incredibly clear. Tension sometimes arose between the quest for product perfection and the need for product stability in production, and learning how to balance those two demands is one of the most useful lessons I took from that environment.

In smaller businesses, I saw how simplicity of structure helped enormously with communication, accountability and ownership. In defence, I learned how programme governance shifts when you are working to contracted deliverables with very tight margins. The way the product develops, and the way decisions are made around it, is quite different to an OEM with a long-term product plan. But the scale of what those teams delivered, with the resources they had, was genuinely admirable.

For all that has happened since, Volta Trucks and Arrival did some things very well. Volta took a considered approach operationally. They weren't trying to build a giant factory on day one. They used temporary space, outsourced intelligently, stayed conscious of cash burn and operational overhead. Arrival had a phenomenal entrepreneurial spirit and an incredibly ambitious vertically integrated vision.

I genuinely admired the ambition at Arrival. The challenge was that the business eventually became too broad as well as too deep. It wasn't just trying to solve the core delivery problem; it was trying to solve almost everything at once. The depth of the vertically integrated thinking wasn't the issue on its own. Had that focus stayed concentrated on one or two product lines while delivery credibility was being established, the story might have evolved differently. Over time, though, the depth started expanding sideways into a wider set of objectives, systems and sub-products, many of which weren't directly connected to getting vehicles to customers consistently.

There is an important lesson there for start-ups. Sometimes the best thing a business can do is narrow its focus, build delivery credibility first, and expand from a position of strength.

You mentioned the danger of businesses building for a future version of themselves too early. Do you think investment structures sometimes contribute to that?

I do, and it is something I'm increasingly interested in discussing with investors themselves. Understandably, they buy into a vision. They are investing in what the business could become: global operations, large production volumes, international service capability, significant market share.

The vision matters. It creates the momentum and confidence that brings people in.

But the investment model can distort operational focus. Organisations start building for the business they hope to become rather than asking the simpler question: 'what do we need to deliver successfully over the next twelve months or to prove what we need to prove?' You can end up with people focused on future territories, long-term systems architecture and global strategy while the production teams are still trying to get the first units built consistently. The organisation is permanently looking out towards the horizon rather than focusing on the operational reality directly in front of it.

There is an interesting question about whether investment governance can evolve to better reflect the realities of hardware delivery cycles. But even just recognising that tension, and being careful about where organisational focus sits at each phase, can make a real difference for founders and leadership teams.

So when you step back from all of this, what does a successful launch ultimately represent to you?

For me, a successful launch is a sign of organisational maturity. Not perfection, because launches are never perfect, but maturity. It shows the organisation understands how to align people, systems, priorities, communication and operational capability around a shared objective.

Restraint is an underrated ingredient. Sometimes operational excellence is less about building more systems and more about understanding what is actually necessary at this moment in time.

That is ultimately the thinking behind MOJO. Helping businesses bridge the gap between great product ideas, right-sized operations and repeatable delivery, without overcomplicating the journey to get there.

Thanks Geoff for your insights.

You're welcome.