Overview
What this challenge is about.
Design a 12-month retail scaling playbook for a plant-based milk brand and stress-test your plan. Earn a verifiable certificate.
The scenario
Mylkman is a 22-person, 4.2-million-euro plant-based oat milk brand from Rotterdam that grew through direct-to-consumer subscriptions and Amsterdam cafe accounts and is now entering Albert Heijn and REWE shelves across the Netherlands and Germany.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
How should Mylkman redesign its organization, hiring sequence, and operating model to support fourfold growth through grocery retail without compromising its direct-to-consumer unit economics or culture?
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Translate a channel-mix shift into a concrete organizational design and reporting structure under explicit founder and budget constraints.
- Sequence senior hires against capability gaps and cash-flow timing rather than against an idealized org chart.
- Model how moving volume from direct-to-consumer to grocery retail reshapes contribution margin, trade spend, and working capital.
- Stress-test a growth plan against a credible downside and design organizational and financial buffers for it.
- Coach a first-time founder to defend hard trade-offs (preserving direct-to-consumer, deferring a Chief Operating Officer) to a board.
Program Fit
Where this fits in your program.
Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.
Aligned coursework coming soon.
Skills
Skills you'll demonstrate.
Each one shows up on your verified credential.
- Organizational Design
Apply organizational design to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Scaling Strategy
Apply scaling strategy to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Hiring Planning
Apply hiring planning to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Unit Economics
Apply unit economics to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Founder Coaching
Apply founder coaching to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
Careers
Career paths this challenge builds toward
Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:
Chief of Staff / Operator-in-Residence
This challenge mirrors the chief-of-staff core: turning a founder's growth ambition into a sequenced organizational and operating plan under hard budget and people constraints, then making it defensible to a board.
This challenge sharpens
- organizational-design
- scaling-strategy
- founder-coaching
Strategic Finance / FP&A Lead
Modeling channel-level contribution margin, staging hires against cash flow, and stress-testing a plan against a downside scenario are the daily work of a strategic finance lead supporting a scaling consumer brand.
This challenge sharpens
- unit-economics
- scaling-strategy
- hiring-planning
Head of People / Org Design Partner
Sequencing eight senior hires, designing reporting lines under a payroll cap, and deciding which capabilities to preserve or dismantle bridges directly into leading organizational design through a high-growth transition.
This challenge sharpens
- organizational-design
- hiring-planning
- founder-coaching