“Unless it’s leading to something tangible, actionable, something that’s gonna drive a result — it was just a good meeting,” says Caroline Daudlin, Collaboration Architect at Coca-Cola.
In the “How Coca-Cola Collaborates: GTM Tactics for R&D & Marketing” webinar, Caroline joins Mural Chief Evangelist Jim Kalbach to share how Coca-Cola aligns cross-functional teams fast. Through intentionally, psychologically safe sessions, marketers and engineers are empowered to turn raw ideas into business-ready solutions.
Caroline pulls back the curtain on the cultural principles, facilitation techniques, and bold thinking that fuel Coca-Cola’s collaborative edge. It’s a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how one of the world’s most iconic brands makes collaboration a fundamental driver of GTM success.
The importance of collaboration in go-to-market strategy
Collaboration: The core of GTM success
GTM success depends on more than individual team performance. Marketing, product, R&D, sales, and customer success each bring valuable insights, but when those teams operate in silos, misalignment creeps in. Priorities clash. Execution slows. Customer needs often get lost in the gaps.
Collaboration gives GTM teams the structure and visibility to move in sync. When teams work together with a shared understanding of the problem, they make better decisions faster. They have a space to surface real issues and solve them together, moving from disconnected plans to cohesive execution.
Driving alignment and speed
In high-performing organizations, collaboration is intentional. Fast, focused sessions replace scattered meetings. Teams use structured methods to define challenges, explore options, and commit to next steps, all within a compressed timeline.
This kind of structured speed matters. Without it, GTM execution slows down due to competing priorities and unclear ownership. But when collaboration is treated as a discipline, it becomes a powerful accelerator. Teams are aligned not just on what to do but also on how to do it.
Why R&D and marketing must partner up
One of the most critical GTM dynamics is the relationship between R&D and marketing. These teams approach problems from different angles, speak in different terms, and measure success differently. But both are essential to innovation.
Bridging that gap takes more than good intentions. It requires a shared language, a clear process, and a safe space to align on what success looks like before the work begins. When that alignment is in place, product and marketing teams stop pulling in different directions and start building technically viable and market-ready solutions.
Coca-Cola's approach to collaboration: "The Vault"
"The Vault": Coca-Cola's dedicated collaboration space
At Coca-Cola, collaboration goes beyond decks and meeting invites — it has a physical home. The Vault is a purpose-built collaboration space located around the corner from the company’s Atlanta headquarters. Designed as a “gateway to collaboration and accelerated growth,” it brings cross-functional teams together for high-impact problem-solving sessions.
“We want it to ignite curiosity and transform raw ideas into real solutions,” shares Caroline. The Vault is where Coca-Cola pushes teams to unlearn what’s familiar, challenge past assumptions, and think boldly about the future. Each session blends structure with creativity, drawing on the collective intelligence in the room through exercises that surface insights, align perspectives, and prioritize what matters most.
Caroline Daudlin: The Collaboration Architect's Role
Caroline’s title of Collaboration Architect reflects the intentionality she brings to every session. Her role is to design the conditions where collaboration leads to tangible progress. “I do this through curating a very collaborative environment that’s psychologically safe,” she explains. “I wanna make sure it’s okay to be vulnerable. It’s okay to make mistakes and think really big to get to those incredible spaces.”
Each session is adapted to the challenge at hand, but the fundamentals of her approach are consistent: structured facilitation, creative framing, and a deep understanding of how to guide teams toward clarity amid ambiguity.
“It’s not something that you can just go on a whim and think it's gonna be successful,” Caroline adds. “You wanna make sure you’re pulling out the right information or collaborating on the right topics that are gonna create momentum for the session.”
Transforming ideas into solutions for growth
Beyond a space for collaboration, The Vault serves as a catalyst for business growth. Whether aligning around future products or solving customer challenges, the goal remains: turning creative thinking into concrete next steps.
To do that, Caroline and her team follow a straightforward yet adaptable approach. Sessions are designed to open up thinking, sharpen focus, and end with alignment on what needs to happen next.
Partnering with key customers
While much of the work inside The Vault focuses on internal alignment, some of the most impactful collaborations happen with Coca-Cola’s largest customers. These sessions bring external partners into the process as true collaborators. To make this work, the Coca-Cola team shifts into listening mode. “We always prioritize the customer first,” Caroline says. “We ask our team: ‘Alright, take a seat, sit in the back… We’re here to focus on the customer.’”
The dynamic is different, but the same principles apply: psychological safety, bold thinking, and fast decision-making. By giving customers the space to voice their needs, explore ideas, and shape the outcome, Coca-Cola deepens strategic partnerships while unlocking new value.
The Vault's collaborative process between R&D and marketing
Empathize & define: Understanding the core problem
Every session in The Vault starts by exploring the bigger picture. Participants are guided to step back from solutions and instead empathize with the end user, the business context, or the cross-functional teams involved.
“How do you define the problem and really understand what it is that we’re solving for?” Caroline prompts. “What is top of mind for teams, for customers, as you think about driving growth for the future?”
Sharpening the challenge for actionable blueprints
After surfacing broader context and perspectives, the next step is narrowing it down. Through facilitated framing exercises on Mural, teams work together to refine the challenge into something sharp and specific that can guide the rest of the session.
Ideate: Unraveling problems and exploring solutions
Once the challenge is locked in, the next phase opens the door to creative thinking. Participants are invited to dig into root causes, explore unexpected angles, and build on each other’s thinking. This step isn’t about finding the perfect idea right away. It captures diverse perspectives while surfacing patterns, uncovering possibilities you wouldn’t get to alone.
Prioritize & drive forward: Ensuring tangible results
With ideas on the board, it’s time to make decisions. Teams cluster, assess, and pressure-test their thinking to identify what’s worth moving forward with. From there, they map out the real next steps: who’s doing what and by when.
“We always want to prioritize,” Caroline says. “We always want to think about a calendar for next steps to make sure we're driving the biggest impact for all teams.”
"More than a meeting:” Gaining momentum and impact
The Vault is designed to do what regular meetings can’t: build alignment, surface new thinking, and create momentum. “Coming to The Vault is more than a meeting,” shares Caroline. “It’s an opportunity for you to gain momentum and drive forward.”
Ground rules for effective collaboration
Collaboration only works when teams agree on how they’ll work together. That’s why every session in The Vault starts with a simple set of ground rules. They shape the tone, encourage open sharing, and help everyone feel safe contributing regardless of title or background.
Here’s how Coca-Cola sets the stage for honest, productive conversations:
Making mistakes & embracing vulnerability
One of the first ground rules participants see is “Make misteaks” — spelled wrong on purpose. Before the session even begins, teams are reminded that it’s okay to get things wrong. That mindset extends to the tools, too. Caroline encourages participants to freely explore Mural’s features: “We always reinforce that you can't break it. Like, just play and just make a mistake, and it's okay.”
"Reckless collaboration:” Encouraging bold sharing
Coca-Cola encourages what Caroline calls reckless collaboration: a mindset where participants are free to throw out raw, half-formed, or even “bad” ideas without fear of judgment. That openness helps teams get unstuck, challenge stale thinking, and move faster. “We want you to throw out ideas, and it can be wrong, and that's okay. All ideas start as bad ideas,” she says.
Pursuing the bold: Thinking big for big results
Big outcomes don’t come from safe thinking. Coca-Cola’s sessions allow big-picture thinking early on, knowing that ideas can always be refined later. Teams are asked to start bigger than they think they should. The logic is simple: if you don’t begin with bold ideas, you’ll never land on bold results.
Unlocking growth through intentional engagement
None of this works without engagement. Sessions are built to be interactive, not observational. By creating space for structured input and collaborative flow, Caroline ensures the session leads to clear GTM tactics that the team helped to build together.
Bridging R&D and marketing: The "bop or flop" exercise
Aligning diverse brains: Marketers vs. engineers
Innovation at Coca-Cola depends on partnerships between teams that don’t always speak the same language. “[The R&D community] thinks in black and white, and marketers can be a little bit more creative or a little bit more abstract,” Caroline notes. “So coming together, you could potentially have tension or butt heads.”
Rather than sidestepping that tension, Caroline leans into it. She kicks off joint sessions with a “bop or flop” premortem exercise, where each team defines what would make a project a success or a failure.
Premortem technique: Defining success and failure upfront
Each participant adds their perspective to a shared mural: green stickies for bops, red stickies for flops. There are no wrong answers — only perspectives that need to be aired. By surfacing these early, teams understand each other’s priorities and limitations without debate or defensiveness.
What makes this even more effective is the “yes, and” technique that follows. Participants can build on someone else’s thought by adding a smaller sticky note beneath the original. For example, if someone says success means “drives sales,” another teammate might add: “+10% lift over baseline”.
Creating a psychologically safe space for critique
Psychological safety isn’t something that just happens. Caroline uses intentional language and framing to keep the sessions open, playful, and low-pressure. She calls these exercises games, using light, sometimes unexpected language — “bop or flop,” “need or value” — to disarm formality and invite honest input.
In the “need or value” game, the prompt is simple: Be super selfish. Pretend the other team isn’t even in the room. What does R&D or marketing need, or what would create value to move forward? This helps teams get clear on their priorities without triggering defensiveness. Marketing might ask for a six-month timeline, while R&D says they need sixteen.
And that’s when something shifts. With priorities out in the open, teams start to see each other’s roles more clearly and realize they’re working toward the same goal. What begins as tension becomes mutual respect. And from there, real collaboration starts to take hold.
Rapid idea generation for shared understanding
These sessions aren’t built for passive discussion. Once alignment is in place, Caroline moves the team into rapid ideation. The format is deliberately flexible: participants add stickies, icons, or notes on the mural to get ideas out quickly. “If you have spent more than fifteen minutes on [an exercise], you have lost, I think, some momentum,” she says.
That speed only works when psychological safety is firmly in place. When people feel safe sharing half-formed thoughts or admitting uncertainty, teams uncover blockers faster, resolve misalignment earlier, and create stronger outcomes.
Visualizing collective goals
The session wraps with a visual map of what’s next. Teams outline concrete action items, assign ownership, and mark follow-ups right in the mural. This final step turns good ideas into real progress. Everyone leaves knowing what needs to happen, who’s doing it, and how it ladders to the bigger goal.
Ready to make collaboration a fundamental driver of GTM impact? Watch the full on-demand webinar with Caroline Daudlin for a closer look at the frameworks, facilitation techniques, and team dynamics behind Coca-Cola’s intentional approach.
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