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Arnie Katz, chief product and technology officer at StubHub (SH), was helping to lead a contest intended to result in innovative and valuable new ideas. Product managers presented more than 100 new business initiative proposals to create new value for customers and provide additional revenue streams and differentiation opportunities. The secondary-ticket (resale) market in the United States was becoming increasingly fragmented, and SH was losing market share. It was imperative to move SH from being a trusted platform for conducting ticket-resale transactions to becoming an integral part of fans' experience of live events. This case is intended to be used in conjunction with a technical note on product-market alignment (PMA): ""Product-Market Alignment"" (UVA-OM-1706). Katz and his teams conduct successive rounds of investigation and data gathering across the three dimensions of PMA: defining the customer need, identifying business value, and evaluating operational capabilities. This case also presents a bridge between high-level operations strategy and a more granular discussion of process capabilities. Agile software development is discussed. This case is suitable for operations-management classes focusing on Agile, scale-up, product and project management, emerging technology, and new product development. It can be used with a graduate, undergraduate, or executive education audience.

In 2013, two employees debated whether to blow the whistle on their employer, Uptown Bank, after completing an internal review that revealed undisclosed conflicts of interest. Uptown Bank's Asset Management business disproportionately invested clients' money in Uptown Bank's mutual funds over funds managed by other banks, letting Uptown Bank collect additional fees-and the bank had not disclosed this conflict of interest to clients. Both employees agreed that failing to disclose the conflict was a problem, but beyond that, they saw the situation very differently. One employee, Neel, perceived the internal review as a good-faith effort by Uptown Bank's senior management to identify and address the problem. The other, Akash, thought that the entire business model was problematic, even with a disclosure, and believed that Uptown Bank may have even broken the law. They considered their options: Should they escalate the issue internally or report it to Uptown Bank's board of directors? Should they go even further and report their findings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission? What would the potential risks and rewards of speaking out be?

This case describes the ESG journey of Pro-invest Group, an asset management and investment firm specialising in private equity real estate across the globe. It begins in 2017, when the Group is launching its second hotel fund, Pro-invest Australian Hospitality Opportunity Fund II (in parallel to managing Fund I) and there is a growing appreciation of the financial and competitive benefits of strong environmental, social and governance considerations. As investor interest in ESG standards rises, Dr. Sabine Schaffer, co-founder and co-CEO Europe, commits to implementing them at every level of the company. The case describes how she drove these efforts, from achieving the GRESB Real Estate Assessment (formerly Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark) to the adoption of a standardized third-party-administered ESG certification scheme across the Group's hotel assets in Australasia. The case ends in 2021 with Pro-invest looking at certification schemes for potential investments in the UK and Europe. It highlights the decisions that were taken, the challenges faced, and the key learning along the way.

Ebidding, Shanghai Huizhao Information Technology Co., Ltd.'s key product, was China's only "Internet+" integrated bidding and procurement service provider, integrating supply chain management consulting, project implementation, and electronic bidding platform operation. Its main business was to provide enterprises with a full-process electronic bidding and procurement solution. The Ebidding team had developed a full-process electronic bidding platform in 2012, and it had been upgraded and developed regularly since then. A business expansion opportunity emerged for Ebidding as a result of shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of precautions to combat COVID-19, offline bidding and procurement across China were severely curtailed. Electronic bidding procurement projects were also stalled due to the inability of experts to evaluate online bids. To seize this market opportunity, gain competitive advantage, and grow its business in the face of significant uncertainty, Ebidding would have to determine how to quickly develop a remote decentralized bid evaluation system, gain acceptance for it, and lead customers to accept the new system.

Swedish technology start-up Primateria AB (Primateria) was founded in November of 2004 with the main idea to provide science-backed consulting services for cutting-tool producers and end-users. What had started as a consulting service without the need for assets turned quickly into a production-driven service to support the cutting tool supply chain. The company had managed to consistently grow without external capital, had automated processes, opened a second physical location, and added physical vapour deposition coating capabilities. For the road ahead, the owners had to now decide how to protect Primateria's intellectual property and how to meet the need for localized services for their large international clients quickly.

This case describes Salesforce's development of Sustainability Cloud, a suite of software tools built to help companies measure, track, and report carbon emissions and other sustainability metrics. The goal of this case is to provide students with a background and foundational knowledge of three topics: software as a service (SaaS); environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards; and carbon accounting. The case places students in the role of the fictional Salesforce vice president of sustainability, who is deciding whether or not to recommend the development and launch of Sustainability Cloud 2.0. She is pondering many issues. Since Salesforce was able to become a world leader in SaaS software, could it become a leader in sustainability software, as well? After analyzing the decision at hand, students should be ready to meet with Salesforce executives and make a recommendation about next steps for the company's sustainability software products.

Lex Machina, a legal analytics start-up, needed cash to drive its continued growth trajectory, and had an appealing Series B term sheet in hand. Founded initially as a joint public interest project between SLS and Stanford's computer science department, Lex Machina had spun off to create a language processing software and machine learning platform to glean insights from legal documents, to support decision making at each stage of the litigation process. Similar to other start-ups, Lex Machina's investors held preferred stock, its founders held common shares, and employees received options granting them the right to buy common shares. After an informal acquisition offer from Bloomberg, the Lex Machina board explored competing acquisition bids. LexisNexis, a longtime leader in the legal database field, emerged as the highest bidder. Should Lex Machina pursue the Series B - or was this the right time to consider acquisition offers? What would be the best option for the company's future - and for the existing stakeholders?

The case tells the evolution of the call center transformation at Frontelco (a major telecom company in disguise). "Digital" and "agile" approaches to changing the way how call centers operate seem to produce different results. Debate between proponents of alternative approaches takes place across three levels of organizational hierarchy: the Managing Director seems to prefer "agile", those close to operations in VP ranks seem to prefer "digital", while three "managers in the middle" following each other in Senior Vice President rank seem to follow different strategies as to how to align the top and the bottom. To settle the debate, evidence-based clarity is being sought and the protagonist is tasked to design an appropriate performance measure to show the real impact of competing approaches.

The case tells the story of a project at Frontelco (a major telco company in disguise) aiming at defining and piloting a business model (Network as a Service, NaaS) in response to the advancement of a new technology (5G). It is written from the perspective of a "trusted advisor" who had been invited by the protagonist to provide methodological support to the project team. The team, which primarily represents the perspective of product management, spends significant time and effort on developing a methodical approach to their own work, leaving the substantive issue (business model innovation) to be defined only vaguely, under the dominant influence of a few team members. In the follow up to the case we learn that by the time concerns emerge that the team does not seem to have developed any presentable output, they find out that their key competitor has already made significant progress and the technology department, their "internal rival", has also moved ahead with a concept that allows them to claim ownership for a major corporate-level project.

When Puneet Chhatwal took over as CEO of Taj Hotels in 2018, he faced an onerous task: improving the financials in a hyper-competitive environment marked by the arrival of foreigners such as Starwood Hotels and online entrants Airbnb and OYO. He perceived that the focus on employee empowerment and welfare (as the basis of service excellence) conflicted with the need to emphasize cost cutting to improve profitability. These inconsistences left managers and staff unsure of the overall strategy. In an attempt to resolve them, the hospitality veteran balanced a top-down drive for change with bottom-up involvement in the strategy-making process. Adept in recognizing and adjusting resource allocation to ensure the parent company IHCL achieved its goals, he delegated tasks to the leadership team and employees but kept them focused on the deliverables. With input from many managers across the organization, a new strategy emerged organically - Aspiration 2022 - that resonated with the entire staff. By late 2019, staff were reporting a stronger sense of direction in day-to-day operations. With this came increased profitability and stock performance in line with group targets. With the success of the turnaround, the CEO seemed set to pursue his strategic vision through 2022. Little did he know that the strategy-making processes he had put in place would be subjected to upheaval as a result of the imminent COVID-19 pandemic.

This case details the struggles of a traditional retailer (Matas) wrestling with the changing retail landscape. The Matas management team recognizes that the company's offline retail business is under serious pressure. Top-line growth has flattened, and bottom-line profitability has declined. The online market is expanding rapidly but is a tiny portion of the business. The team is aware that the company needs to grow the online business. However, this shift will be financially difficult because the margins for the online business are near zero and it represents less than 3% of total business. As the market leaders, whatever Matas management chooses to do will inevitably affect its core "in-store" business. The company needs the cashflow from the in-store business to pay dividends to investors. In this situation, the new CEO sets out three priorities (i) reignite store growth, (ii) build new growth paths, and (iii) grow online. Investors are unhappy with this direction and the stock has sunk to an all-time low. The question is whether this new strategy will enable Matas to survive or transform?

The First Opium War (1839-1842) symbolized the peak of the era of European imperialism, with a political and cultural legacy that remains potent to this day. The British Empire, "acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness" as one observer famously claimed, seemed to be financially dependent on the sale of illegal narcotics to China, which had banned the trade. Nevertheless, London was willing to go to war to force China to import its opium, and superior British military technology made resistance unfeasible. Ever since, China's political leaders have seen this even as the beginning of their "Century of Humiliation," and China's political objective ever since has been to upend the political and economic order that made such a humiliation possible.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s when Joseph Stalin, leader of the world's first Communist state, sought to industrialize his largely peasant country on an unprecedented scale, he turned for help to those who had the most experience constructing on such a scale: American businessmen. The ultimate stated purpose of his industrialization program, however, was to end the capitalist system that those businessmen embodied. At the time, the Soviet Union was an international pariah, not recognized by Washington until 1933, surrounded by largely hostile states whose political systems Moscow was trying to subvert in a contest that both sides saw as existential. Despite this, it was American architects and engineers that gave the Soviets the advanced designs and technology they needed to build "socialism in one country," constructing the industrial base that would one day defeat Nazi Germany.

In August 2021, Singapore Airlines Group (SIA) was at a critical juncture in its history. Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had forced commercial travel to almost a standstill, requiring SIA to idle most of its fleet. The group's overall revenues had declined by 76 per cent in the 2020/21 financial year, resulting in a loss of S$4.27 billion. The massive cash bleed forced the group to issue new capital, thus diluting the stake of its existing shareholders. Although SIA's results had improved for the quarter ended June 30, 2021, the emergence of new virus variants and continued travel restrictions meant that the group needed to make critical decisions that would have implications for both its short-term survival and its long-term performance.

This case profiles the National Hockey League (NHL), the most prestigious professional hockey league in the world. It presents the league's history, highlighting facts inherent to professional sports in North America. It also examines the NHL's value proposition, sources of revenue, and major expenses. Finally, it looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the league's business model, speculating about the future.

Stemina Lubricants (Stemina) was an automotive lubricant manufacturer in Udupi, Karnataka, India. All Stemina products were a blend of high-class base oil and imported branded additives. Stemina competed with leading brands-one that was strong in the market and at mechanics' locations, having leveraged its consumer brand equity and strong advertising support to win over mechanics and dealers, and another that had a strong presence in the forecourts of gas stations in India. Customers looking for oil changes at gas stations were likely to purchase these company brands rather than a local brand, and Stemina faced an uphill battle to establish itself in a market with such entrenched distribution. How could this small business, with few resources for branding and distribution, successfully establish itself in the market?

The owner of Physio2U, the largest provider of in-home physical rehabilitation services in Western Canada, was forced to rapidly transition to telehealth amid the growing threat of COVID-19 in early 2020. While the Physio2U team and its patients were pleasantly surprised by their success with telehealth, as vaccination rates increased and the threat of COVID-19 infection became less significant, she had some tough decisions to make. She wondered if telehealth was (a) just a temporary solution to survive the pandemic; or (b) an opportunity for her business going forward. Before she invested any more resources in telehealth, including marketing funds, the owner needed to make sure she had both a strong business case and a comprehensive strategy for offering telehealth post-pandemic.

When Ajaypal (Ajay) Banga became the CEO of Mastercard in 2010, he shifted the company's competitive focus from card networks to cash itself. Mastercard's new vision of a "World Beyond Cash" distilled into a three-pronged framework: Grow the core business, Diversify customers and employees, and Build new businesses that reinforce Mastercard's core capabilities. With digital technologies on the rise, Banga knew that innovation would need to become a strategic imperative. Yet, in a 2010 survey, Mastercard's 7,000 employees ranked "innovation" as the 26th most important factor for the future of Mastercard in a list of 27. Banga tasked Garry Lyons, who had joined Mastercard through the 2009 acquisition of Orbiscom, with infusing innovation into Mastercard's culture. With a significant incremental investment, and free reign to spend it as he pleased, Lyons created Mastercard Labs-a global R&D network that became a catalytic force for change at the company. In December 2017, Lyons is stepping down from his role as Chief Innovation Officer and reflecting on the path ahead for Mastercard and its Labs.