At WalmartLabs in California, I led a team to drive what was really a single product - an end-to-end retail e-commerce platform - initially focussed on grocery home delivery and then plugging-in apparel and general merchandise capability. So, by no means, is this a ‘small’ product - and I guess many organisations would now break this down into a number of key areas for development. However, at the time, and given we were the ‘crazy startup’ team in San Francisco, we tackled the e-commerce platform almost in a left-to-right flow (starting with bringing content in ... then to the estore ... and then into the significant complexity of delivery and picking logistics). An amazing opportunity to get into the detail of functionality and experience across a wide spectrum of capability in e-commerce platform design (not to mention all the work required to ensure it would meet the scale and security requirements set by the World’s largest retailer!)
At cap hpi (a predominately B2B data business in the automotive sector), I was asked to build a product and UX team from scratch to look after an existing portfolio of c.40 products - and develop a pipeline of new product and feature delivery (of course!) This was not a small portfolio by anyone’s standards and was the result of two previous companies (CAP and HPI) being merged under a broader global acquisition. It was clear to me just how much more complex it was going to be leading and managing a product portfolio on this scale. Creating product visions, strategies and roadmaps needed a different approach. With my newly formed team, we decided to roll-up the portfolio into customer value-driven categories (very much mirroring the ‘jobs to be done’ framework - for which I’m a huge evangelist). With some further consolidation of individual product lines, we were then able to leverage our building customer insight to start to form visions and strategies for each category. Roadmap views were still more complicated than I’d have liked - but I’m someone who loves making the complex more simple - so I’m never satisfied with this sort of thing (much to my team’s annoyance!) I’m really glad to have had the experience of not only B2B product and UX leadership but also large product portfolio management and the techniques to help ‘simplify the complex’.
