72 hours.
One brief.
One room.

odrej Consumer Products is one of India's oldest and largest consumer companies. Soaps, hair colour, insect repellent, home fragrance — products that quietly run through millions of homes every week. The work is unglamorous in the best sense: precise, physical, repeated.

Inside GCPL sits Aer, the home-fragrance brand. Car perfumes you've probably seen at toll booths. Pluggables and gels. And now, the brand's biggest bet in three years — Aer Studio.

A device, a refill, and a ritual.

Aer Studio is a plug-in continuous-diffusion device. Twist a refill into it and it releases fragrance steadily for about four weeks. The device is engineered with a new twist-lock — a quarter-turn mechanism that meters oil to the millilitre. The fragrance was developed by Aer's in-house perfumers over two years.

The whole product makes sense only if customers come back for the refill. The device is the door; the refill is the room.

It's Tuesday, 11:47 PM. Your phone rings.

It's Kavita Rao, the Category Head for Aer. She doesn't apologise for the hour. She tells you that ten weeks in, Aer Studio is the best product launch this category has seen in three years — and that refill repeats are down 52% from plan, and no two people in the building agree on why.

"The leadership review is Friday morning. I don't need a hero. I need someone who can find out what's actually happening. You have 72 hours. Spend them like they're yours — because they are."

That's the brief. That's all of it.

You can talk to any of them. They each see a different room.

Some words they use are everyday in their world and unfamiliar outside it — GT, MT, transition circular, sell-through. The Glossary button stays with you on every screen. Use it without shame.

Read. Choose. Decide. Build. Walk in.

1. 1
   Read evidence

   A small set of charts, customer calls and field notes are open to you immediately. Each one costs hours from your budget.

2. 2
   Choose your routes

   From a longer list of investigations, pick the three you'll actually pull on. You can't pull all of them.

3. 3
   Make decisions under a clock

   Moments arrive without warning. A timer runs. You can think, you can consult an advisor (it costs hours), you can act, or you can let the default happen. All four are allowed.

4. 4
   Build a board, commit a hypothesis

   Pin the pieces of evidence that fit together. Pick the single explanation you're willing to defend.

5. 5
   Allocate ₹40 lakh

   A stabilisation budget, in ₹5L steps. What you fund is the story you're telling.

6. 6
   Write the brief

   Three or four sentences. The way you'd say it out loud. Ninety seconds on the clock.

7. 7
   Walk into the room

   Friday morning. The room reads what you brought.

• Reversibility matters. A move you can take back tomorrow is cheaper than a move you can't.
• Time is a budget, not a vibe. Hours spent somewhere are hours you don't have somewhere else.
• Asking is allowed. Consulting an advisor is a skill, not a confession.
• Plain words beat impressive ones. If a sentence needs a glossary, rewrite the sentence.
• The room is warm. There isn't a single trick answer or a gotcha ending. The point is how you think.