Moments of impact from Emily Privot McNamara's career
A mid-sized consumer goods company wanted to embed regenerative design principles into its product line but lacked a clear framework for measuring progress or aligning teams around a shared vision. I was brought in as an outside advisor to design a measurement framework and facilitate cross-functional workshops so that product, design, and sustainability teams could align on shared regenerative design metrics. I began by interviewing stakeholders across each team to surface conflicting priorities and understand where misalignment was creating friction. From there, I drafted a set of five regenerative design metrics tied to the company's existing product KPIs, ensuring the new framework would integrate with how teams already measured success rather than compete with it. I then ran three workshops over six weeks, using prototypes and scoring exercises to build consensus across teams, and iterated the framework in response to pushback from the sustainability team to ensure it reflected genuine cross-functional buy-in rather than a top-down mandate. The results were tangible and fast: within two quarters, all three teams were actively using the framework to score new product concepts. It directly influenced the redesign of two flagship products, cutting material waste by 15%, and gave leadership a shared dashboard to track regenerative progress across the organization — transforming an abstract sustainability ambition into a concrete, measurable practice embedded in everyday product decisions.
