Sustainability Certification Recertification Project Manager Simulation — Patagonia

The scenario

Patagonia has been a Certified B Corporation since 2011 — the first in California — and scored 166.0 on the B Impact Assessment at its last recertification, against a median of roughly 51 for companies that complete the assessment. Certification is not a badge the company bolted on. It is the structure the ownership transfer was built around, it is cited in the annual Benefit Corporation report, and it appears on the hangtag of products sold in sixty countries. Recertification comes due every three years, and the FY26 cycle is now open. The work itself is coordination, not construction. Five categories — Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, Customers — are assessed across three separate regional submissions covering the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Each answer has to be supported by evidence that a B Lab verification analyst will sample and challenge: factory audit reports, payroll and benefits data, Higg FEM scores, governance documents, supplier contracts, charitable giving records. The $500,000 budget covers the certification fee, an assurance partner, evidence tooling, and backfill for the people pulled off their day jobs to find documents. Nobody is against this project. That is precisely the problem you have been hired to solve. Every function believes in the certification and every function has a fiscal year to close, a season to ship, and a team that is already fully committed. The forty-odd people who actually hold the evidence do not report to you, cannot be compelled by you, and have never been told what "audit-ready" means in a way they could act on. Your job is to get what is true about this company out of forty inboxes and into a submission that will survive being checked.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Submit all three regional B Impact Assessments (Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific) inside B Lab's FY26 window with every scored answer backed by filed evidence
• →Maintain a verified score at or above the 80-point certification threshold in every region, with no category scoring below its FY23 result by more than 5 points
• →Build a single evidence register covering 100% of scored questions, naming one accountable owner and one evidence artifact per question
• →Close every B Lab clarification request within 10 business days of receipt across the verification window
• →Deliver the cycle within the $500,000 approved budget and hand a reusable evidence process to the Impact Measurement team at closure

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •The FY23 evidence was assembled in the final six weeks of the last cycle and was never indexed, so its re-usability under the revised standard is unknown
• •Worker headcount and contractor classification definitions changed between cycles, which means the Workers category numbers may not reconcile to the prior submission
• •Tier 2 supplier audit refresh dates fall outside the FY26 data cut-off for an unknown number of facilities
• •Three regional submissions depend on a common definition set that does not yet exist, so one region's late evidence can block another's verification
• •No function has dedicated headcount for evidence work, and the cycle competes directly with fiscal-year close

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 7 stakeholders, including Corinne Aldana (VP, Social & Environmental Responsibility), Theo Berglund (Director, Impact Measurement & Certification), Imani Rowe (Senior Impact Data Analyst), and more.

What you'll walk away with

A verified, shareable record of a completed enterprise project — plus the PMO deliverables you produced along the way (charter, project plan, SteerCo deck, closure document). It's real, demonstrable project management experience you can put on your resume and speak to in interviews.

Frequently asked questions

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