HP unifies global product launch coordination with Smartsheet

HP started in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939. Today, it is one of the most enduring names in technology, operating in over 170 countries. “There are very few tech brands that have spanned generations, from our grandparents to our kids, and HP is one of them,” shares Lyn Tan, Program Manager and Chief of Staff, New Product Introductions at HP. “Our company has been at the centre of how people print, create, and work for decades.”

Siloed tools, disconnected teams

Behind every HP product that reaches the market is a team making sure it gets there on time, on spec, and on budget. This involves managing multiple programs at once across engineering, manufacturing, quality, and operations.

When the company switched to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, coordinating that complexity became much harder. The team realized that data was scattered across disconnected tools, spreadsheets, email attachments, and slide decks, making it nearly impossible to see the full picture. Program managers found themselves repeating the same updates to different stakeholders just to keep everyone aligned. “When we started working from home, we were overwhelmed with meetings just to catch up,” recalls Tan.

Slow reporting, delayed decisions

Reporting became one of the biggest administrative burdens. Project managers were losing a fifth of their time to status updates alone. “We'd spend every month chasing program managers for data, collecting file attachments, and manually stitching everything together into one report. Because everyone used their own format, half the effort was just making things consistent,” shares Tan.

Without a single source of truth, people were looking at different versions of the same data and drawing their own conclusions. With teams spread across time zones, decisions that should have taken hours were taking days, sometimes weeks. “While we were busy reformatting spreadsheets, decisions were waiting, and products were waiting,” Tan adds. Slow decisions led to rework, which blew out budgets and stretched the teams’ capacity, reducing the room to take on new programs. If one project slipped, it risked the entire portfolio—and with it, HP's competitive edge. 

“We realized we needed to transform the way we manage our projects, with better visibility, fewer meetings, easier reporting, and ultimately a faster time to market.”

Standardized, yet flexible

The team deployed Smartsheet, building a structured, intelligent workspace where program status, schedules, checkpoint documents, review decks, and retrospectives all live in one place. 

“Our program managers retrieve core documents as needed within seconds, speeding everything along. When they update their status, it flows straight into the executive view, removing the need for the previous time-consuming updates,” Tan notes. Smartsheet also serves as an archive. “If we need to understand what challenges a product faced during its launch phase, even years later, it's all there,” Tan adds.

All documentation now follows a standardized format—so nothing gets lost in translation between teams—with the flexibility to adapt as the company evolves. “Our project management documentation always goes through different revisions. We can't set things up in a way that stays stagnant,” Tan explains.

Real-time, company-wide visibility

The team also built two-tiered dashboards to keep all stakeholders informed and aligned. The top half gives leadership the full milestone roadmap across every program. At a glance, they can see what requires their attention and what risks the business is carrying, replacing what used to be a lengthy briefing with a single view.

The bottom half goes a layer deeper for cross-functional teams, enabling them to plan proactively and quickly respond to changes. For example, a supply chain manager can check which programs are approaching launch to get raw material contracts lined up in time, and see which segments of the business are bringing new products to market. “We went from a fragmented, manual reporting process to a standardized, consistent output system,” Tan shares.

Accelerating execution and delivery

With dashboards delivering the right insights to the right people, teams can execute in sync. “When you're launching multiple products at once across engineering, manufacturing, quality, and operations, you can't afford to have any blind spots,” Tan explains. 

“Having a single source of truth, with color-coded risk levels, trend indicators, and AI helping us surface what needs attention, means we catch issues earlier and make faster, more intelligent decisions.”

As Smartsheet does the heavy lifting, HP program managers spend less time collecting, cleaning, and communicating data. “We got our time back,” Tan shares. “Thanks to automated dashboard updates, we no longer need to send update requests across teams. We can actually focus on what the data is telling us—where the bottlenecks are, and where we need to step in.”

The payoff is simple: products reach the market sooner. “A brand that's meant something to people for generations doesn't get to cut corners,” Tan concludes. “By removing all the noise and giving our team more visibility, we're getting technology that makes people's lives easier into their hands faster.”