Challenge

• Technology context: The business had begun a very ambitious, multi-year re-platforming project. But there was not a lot of clarity about what this would mean for the end ‘products’, neither in terms of product design nor for the collaboration model between internal teams and external partners.

• Organisational context: There was a big gap between the Tech organisation and the rest of the business. Past experiences had led to low trust and siloed thinking.

• Product context: Product teams had been set up, but with no common understanding of Product Owner responsibilities, no UX or product design embedded in the product teams, and no bandwidth for product discovery.

Solution

• I was blessed to have a great team in place, but when I joined they were very demoralised and lacking leadership. My first step was to start revitalising the team, by opening up their mindset and inspiring them with a view of what the team and organisation could become. I encouraged them to challenge the status quo and pursue goals they believed in with passion and empowerment.

• Already in my first month I created a strategic framework, with a draft product vision and goal for each area of the business. I socialised this framework with the C-suite, product and business leaders – setting a new ambition level that everyone could get behind.

• I championed a much greater focus on product discovery, and drove more user research, even with a hiring freeze and very limited resources. I love being hands-on, so I even stepped in to help with the research brief, discussion guide, and led the first user interview.

Learning & Impact

• Re-platforming is a complex process, and needs to be managed carefully to avoid dips in performance and revenues. I quickly developed a transition plan to ensure a smooth migration from a product and business perspective, and I developed options for new collaboration models between myToys and its OTTO Group partners.

• To model how the new product practice should work, we created a pilot product team for Retail Media. The concept we developed during the problem/solution fit phase indicated a 3x uplift in revenues compared to the current product. We tried to minimize dependencies on anyone outside this team, and we quickly learnt that the more resources in the team who are part-time, the more resource management is required to ensure progress is not blocked.

• The product team transformed into a highly-motivated, tightly-bonded unit, and we successfully started to break down silos by gaining the trust of colleagues across the business. Sadly, we couldn’t complete our overall journey, as the OTTO Group had to make a difficult call to close down myToys in 2023, owing to business challenges and the general climate for eCommerce.

Team

• The core product platform team was one of the best I have worked with. They really stepped up and helped to drive a new attitude into the organization. A special shout out to Jessi, Mariah, Jean, Wei, Anja, Ajay, Hagen and Shruti. And also Stefano, who I coached in hist first Product Owner role, and who delivered an impressive product discovery phase to model the new working practices.

• Also deep recognition to my collaborators (and ex-AKQA alumni) Mario Fürderer as Head of Delivery and Howard O’Toole as Solution Architect. And equally important Lena Wiemann who managed the re-platforming project and Kevin De Silva who drove a transformation programme for the whole organisation to become more product-oriented.