SPEAKER_00 0:00

Our roles are going to be just as much about what we don't build. You've already seen in the last six weeks where initially it was all going to be open AI. Now it sounds like Google's going to play a much bigger role in that. You could use Claude and Claude could teach you how to code. It's very easy in a boardroom people picking up the latest, you know, feed from retail week or something and saying, oh, you know, so and so have launched an agentic trial. What are we doing about it?

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Is there a danger that it will go back to how it was? People become delivery people again. You can become a lazy product manager.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

If you remain positive and you embrace these new technologies and figure out how to use them to your advantage, that's going to put us ahead from those that don't.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Today on On the Pulse, we're joined by someone who spent over two decades at the forefront of product, technology, and digital transformation across some of the UK's most recognizable brands. Fabrice Kula is currently director of product, UX and Optimisation at Boots UK and has previously held senior product leadership roles at companies like Selfridges, Sainsbury's and Sky. What's really interesting about Fabrice's journey is that he's seen product from both sides, from true consumer tech environments through to large-scale retail businesses where the rules are very different. Today we're going to explore three things. First, Fabrice's journey into product leadership and what shaped his thinking. And second, what's really happening inside product teams today, especially in retail, and why the role is changing so quickly. And then third, what all of this means for the next generation of product leaders and how you should be thinking about your career in this new world. Fabrita, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Absolute pleasure. We just had a nice lunch. We did. Yes. Had a nice steak, stomachs are full, ready to talk about some hopefully really interesting stuff. And yeah, it's really good to have you. We obviously have known each other for a while now, especially during your most recent role. What I'm really keen for our viewers to hear about today is I guess really starting from where it all began and then all the way through to what the future might look like. And no one better to kind of give us an insight than than yourself on that. So let's start at the beginning. Really keen to understand kind of your career journey. Like how did it all start for you, especially on that product pathway as well?

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Yeah, um, sure. I mean it's a bit a big question, but let me see if I can if I can help. I mean, I I can start with obviously my my career. Um I mean, I didn't I didn't start in retail. So I've been in retail for the last 10 years, but I guess I'll go a little bit earlier where um I came up through, I suppose interestingly enough, I studied um journalism at university the first time. Okay. Um ended up working in media businesses, uh, but not necessarily on that side of the fence, got into more technology roles, starting to sort of play that bridge between um the technology teams and the users of various internal systems. And I think in many ways, you know, in the kind of early 2000s, we weren't necessarily calling that product management in those businesses yet. But effectively being that sort of translation layer between what the business is trying to achieve and how you you know leverage technology to um to enable it. Um through that, I had the opportunity of moving on the consumer side in places like uh what was then Orange has since become EE. Yeah. But really starting to look at, you know, where TV was moving away from scheduled broadcasts onto these platforms, streaming platforms, you know, uh, over the internet and and kind of the disruption that was having in that industry and that sector. Um, and had the opportunity to kind of work as a product manager in um a couple of really interesting scenarios where we were building, you know, trying to build these new propositions pretty much from scratch on new technology, um, leveraging partnerships, leveraging things that we, you know, those businesses had, but um a very different way to approach um how you kind of invest and how you build in technology because again, being really conscious of all the disruption out there, how the consumer was moving to different models, different platforms, different ways of consuming their entertainment, um, and being able to respond to that by you know being able to rebuild in some cases or build um products from scratch. So that was quite an exciting place to be doing products at the time.

SPEAKER_02 4:48

That's that's really cool. And like the the the change that you would have seen must have been immense. Um, and then I I guess in terms of you mentioned that it wasn't even really known as a product role back then. Like what were you referred to? Was it project management?

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Yeah, I suppose in my first role where I was really kind of involved with technology, I was a project manager and a business analyst. Yeah. Um, and then the the role I kind of moved on to next, I was actually called a product development manager at that point. So the word product was starting to creep in. But I suppose at that point, especially in telco, product managers were still seen as more of the marketing role that kind of told the technology teams what to do. So it was an interesting setup again, where product there was that split between product management and product development. Yeah. And I know we still have that today with sort of product manager versus product owner, which we can talk about. I have opinions on that. Um, but it was quite an interesting blend where I suppose over time we realized that that was probably the same role because ultimately you needed someone that could be agnostic enough to understand the things that your marketing, your customer, your operational teams were asking you to do, but agnostic enough to kind of think about it from the lens of what's the user really looking for in terms of having this problem solved. And also how do you work with technology and protect your technology teams from working on the most valuable stuff to enable those new solutions, those new experiences for your customers? So it was quite interesting to see that shift. And I suppose, you know, starting to see product management becoming much more of a of a role within these organizations.

SPEAKER_02 6:30

And in terms of then the transition into retail, how did that evolve and and happen?

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Well, I suppose, and and probably still to this day, one of my um favorite career experiences was the opportunity to work at um, I spent four and a half years or so at Sky, and Sky was a still is, I'm sure, a very interesting business that's almost like five or six businesses in one. And I got to move around a little bit from the you know selling consumer side of it, like building, you know, the website where people order their products all the way through to being part of the first team that got to scale now TV. And now TV was really exciting, I think, at the time. I know it's I think it's now called now. It is. It was now TV back then. Um, and it was really exciting because I thought it was it was a really courageous move, I thought, for a business the size of Sky to go, well, we can see this disruptions coming. We can see that like Netflix, Amazon, you know, they're coming to our shores with their streaming products. We can either let them eat our lunch or we can respond by disrupting our own business. And so creating this kind of slightly lower tier, lower value non-subscription proposition through their streaming platform. And at the time leveraging what they had already built with Skygo, I just thought it was a really interesting move for a business of that size. There was about a hundred engineers across different kinds of customer areas, and I got to lead uh initially mobile at the time, so iOS, Android, emerging platforms at the time like Google, Chromecast, and Apple TV, but then also eventually moving into the set top box uh space, which was a really big product for now, because it was bringing together actually the new world of streaming and the slightly older world of broadcast onto the same uh platform. And again, just really exciting because I got to build products from all sides. I had like the software in terms of, you know, the apps we were building internally with my squads, but also working very closely with the teams in the US at Roku building our operating system. But then also, I think product management in a physical product where you're building a set top box and you've got to have it, you know, you've promised it in the Argos catalog by July, you've got to hit that deadline. It's just a very different world. And I think at that point, um, I was approached by a grocery retailer, and it was really interesting. The guy who who kind of approached me was sort of saying, Well, you know, clearly your career so far, you've built some amazing things in the consumer product landscape and in the media and telco world where you've lived through that disruption and that the way the consumer is disrupting um those industries. That's something we're starting to see in retail. Like we know that people are navigating our stores with their phones in their hand, right? Looking at why, you know, trying to understand why the pricing online is different to the pricing in the store, trying to understand why they can't get the same offers, why these things are so disjointed. And, you know, there's a need for us to start to think about this with more of a product and technology lens. And they'd been going through a big transformation where they'd kind of moved from a much more of a kind of traditional project IT structure to creating these product teams. I mean, and again, this is just my opinion, but they probably went about it in the way that a lot of businesses did initially, where I think overnight they said, anybody in our business who's a business analyst or project manager, you're now a product owner. Yeah, you know, and they they did those classic things that I think we've all then learned was probably not the way to do it, but it was still a really interesting opportunity. And I thought, you know, a great challenge to go into an industry that um what I think is exciting about retail, and I saw that at the time, is that as much as I've clearly mentioned how much I liked working at Sky, you're still, I think in telco and in those sort of more pure product companies, you're still that little further removed from the customer. Yeah. Because the way you talk to your customer is usually through a call center or you know, nowadays through social and those kinds of channels. In retail, I remember those first experiences when I was in retail. You're in a store trying to figure out how do you make this bit of technology that you were trying to build work in that environment. And you're dealing with, you know, the people who run the shop, the people on the shop floor, the customers are right there. They're all around you, they're talking to you. And in this instance, in particular at Sainsbury's, when you were head office, you had to, you had to wear a suit if you ever went to visit a store. And we were testing a product. We were building early versions of what eventually became smart shops. So the scan as you go product that's in many Sainsbury's and other supermarkets today. Um, you know, you'd have to, you'd have to go dressed in a suit. So all the customers know you're a member of the staff. And we'd be sort of, you know, talking to our engineering teams, trying to figure out how we're going to test this thing in store. And someone would tap you on the shoulder and say, excuse me, um, can you just help me? Because the the fruit section is a mess over there, you know, and you had to interact with customers and you could see right there what they thought of your brand, yeah, what they said. And and especially I think in supermarkets, it's a really interesting ecosystem because you're part of that local community. Yeah. And people feel they have some ownership to that. Like you're, you know, your local Sainsbury's is your local Sainsbury's. You have a say in how things work, right? In a way, as a customer. So again, just that being that close to the customer was a really exciting opportunity, I thought, to build some really exciting products.

SPEAKER_02 11:49

Was that one of the fundamental differences that you found moving from into retail, that closeness to the customer? I mean, that's what seeing it in real time and how your decisions impacted things.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Absolutely. Yeah. And I I think it was more the opportunity that that presented. I think the reality, I'm sure we'll come on to was slightly different. And that's more about the mindsets, the way retail works. It's very different to, I think, consumer tech. But absolutely, I remember early conversations in that business where we were saying, you know, we've got this product, we've built it, we've got two stores where we're testing it out. Arguably, we have another thousand stores that are all like mini-labs where we can go and test things on customers and also importantly on colleagues, right? You need the the people that work in those stores have to be able to help a customer if they can't download the app or if the journey's not quite working. Or, you know, again, it's that sort of you've got this multifaceted thing that you've got to get your product to do. Um, that's a lot more complex than just saying, right, push a button, release it, and customers will be fine, right? There's that added kind of change element that's super exciting.

SPEAKER_02 12:54

So let's back up a bit because you touched on um the role of of products within retail was was probably slightly different, certainly when you entered, um, as and you touched on you know delivery people typically taking on those roles. Can you expand on that for me?

SPEAKER_00 13:13

Yeah, there's a there's probably a couple of ways I I see it being different. Is I think traditionally retailers, and and to this day, I think that's still the case in some some areas, see technology as a cost center and not necessarily as a capability or a strategic enabler. Where, and I guess that makes sense in a very complex environment where, in order to sell the customer a product, you're going through so many different channels to get there. If you think about it as a business, right? In a retailer, you've got who really owns the customer. It's it's very difficult to pinpoint a single team because, of course, the marketing teams will say they own the customer, they own a part of that relationship. But then you've got all your merchandising, your supplier relationships, your brands, your buyers, you know, your operational teams, your technology teams, which again in that scenario are very much seen as another cost center that helps you, you know, develop things, develop products to service that customer. That's very different to an environment where the product you're building is the product you're selling. In that case, you see technology out of the box almost as a technology, as an innate, as a strategic enabler, because without it, you're not building now TV to sell it on, right? For in that example. So that in itself starts to create a very different relationship and expectation of what product management in UX is there to do. And I think, you know, that big difference is that product management is often seen as part of that delivery function. And it's that that evolution almost of, you know, you're there to take requirements from a business expert, you know, flesh them out, of course, work with a UX team to potentially design those customer experiences if they are front-end facing or customer-facing. And then you're kind of handing that over the fence to your engineering team who go and build stuff. And there isn't really that understanding that I think maybe consumer techn get and more pure product companies gained earlier, which is the role of product, of course, there's a delivery angle to it. I think that's very important. But there's also this element of you're there, you should, you the role you play should also be to help figure out what's the right thing to build. Yeah. Do we know that this really does solve that problem for the customer? You know, is it really about just putting that tick box on the website that you're asking me to put on, or is it actually what's the outcome you think that tick box is going to get us to? And are there better ways or more elegant ways or less expensive ways to get there? For example, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:44

At what point did your view of what good product looks like really change? And then how do you go about enabling that change within retail?

SPEAKER_00 15:58

I mean, not to sound cheesy, but it's a journey. It's not something I've figured out straight away or that was, you know, I think a I think a lot of this is isn't rocket science. I think a lot of people know that. A lot of product people will know that speaking to peers in other industries or other verticals. Um I don't think I've solved it either, just to be clear, I think it's still, you know, a lot of through different transformations, different programs, different stages, I think that some of these businesses find themselves in, you realize that there are opportunities to do more or less of that. Um maybe that's that's another thing that's important, is that difference in the role comes from both sides in a way. I think what I saw in the in the first retailer I was in was that you had this kind of real view that the role of product was to tell the technology teams what to build based on the requirements that you'd gathered from within the business. And in that, I suppose you're making an assumption that the business really knows the customer or really understands the problem, and your job is just to execute on that. You do that a few times, you get it wrong in real life, and that's what starts to kind of unravel the chain of events, and you start to go, well, actually, should the role be we hear you, business SMEs, but what else are we not thinking about? What you know, we're a little bit agnostic, like you need to drive this number in your PL, for example, and you need or or this metric. We're also thinking about other metrics, like maybe more customer, more experienced ones. Um, we're also thinking about the reality of that tech stack, because we're that, you know, again, I would say where I think we still get it wrong sometimes is we assume that product people can just come from non-technical disciplines. I'm not saying they can't, but I think you've got to have an interest in it or at least be able to question your engineers and ask the hard questions or answer the hard questions because your role is also to protect that technical product, right? You could just agree to ship everything your stakeholders are asking you for, but what you're actually doing is you're making the system underneath more complicated and harder to upgrade next time or to change. So effectively, again, I'd say like tech debt I see as a product strategy problem as much as a technical problem and something the business should care about. But those are all things that I think you realize through a lot of it, through experience, through testing, learning, too, through doing things like going through the process of you know, building that thing that we were we were told by the highest paid person in the room is the most important thing we have to build. And then you build that thing, you go through that pain, all the classic kind of you know, paradigms of like you don't necessarily deliver it on time, it ends up costing more, you know, all those things happen because technology and delivery is hard, but you land it and your customer doesn't really notice or doesn't care, or it doesn't do that thing that we thought it was going to do. So I think that sort of test and learn approach of almost, and by that I mean, you know, having done it a few times, having seen where things don't fully land, I actually think has been helpful because that then allows you, that gives you a case study or a proof point next time to go to your stakeholders, to go to your exec, to go to your most senior business partners and say, should we try it slightly differently this time? Like let's do a bit of discovery, let's figure out if we can, you know, what's the the cheapest way we could build this thing, or could we build a prototype of it, put it in front of some customers just to give us that sense of direction. And actually, that was something I managed to do very early on at Sainsbury's, where I convinced them to run their first ever design sprint. And I think it was because I'd been to a conference and I'd heard Jake Knapp, who I think wrote the book on design sprint speak. This was many years ago. Um, and I was just blown away by this. And I was like, we've got, you know, we had a couple of fairly gnarly problems at Sainsbury's that we were wrestling with, things that were coming straight down from the exec, like we should just do this. And it was like, well, what if we could very quickly in a week, and it's not going to cost us much, go and try this process, right? And I'm sure, you know, there are better ways now. This is slightly dated now, but it was just really interesting to be able to say, well, you know, we tried it this way, and it clearly didn't work. What if we just did this, this very small, fairly inexpensive way to test something by the end of the week, you know, we'll put it in front of some customers in a safe way on a couple of iPads, we'll have a clickable prototype or something they can look at. And that will give us like a view on what's the direction we take next. And really, again, like I think at that point, even realizing that the language you use as product people and UX people sometimes needs to change for your retail partners to really listen to you. So rather than try to ramble the terminology down their throats, right, and make it all about these cool buzzwords and being more agile and all this stuff, it's more like, you know, if you can speak to someone about, well, what if we reduce the risk? What if we make sure we invest in the right thing? What if we're, you know, able to qualify the right priorities? Or it's just, I think it's about kind of getting them to see that what you're trying to do is actually going to benefit them as well in terms of getting to that milestone. So look, it's I I don't want anyone to think that I've got it all figured out because it's something I still see, you know, I've seen improvements in it. I've seen places where I think um they are getting closer to that. Again, it's probably easier if you're in a pure play retailer versus um maybe a bricks and mortar one, which again has has that additional complexity. Um, I think the other big force, and I know we're going to come on to this, is how rapidly technology is is changing and moving around us. I think that is also gonna start to, and I'm seeing this in my business, start to move that conversation around we need to focus more on figuring things out up front before we invest heavily, because getting it wrong is quite costly. And things are moving so quickly that it's very easy to get it wrong.

SPEAKER_02 22:03

Yeah. Right. Yeah. So in a world where you can build anything, but the the real question is it it should we be building it? How has that kind of shaped how you've hired and built product teams over the years?

SPEAKER_00 22:18

I mean, absolutely, that's a really important point. I think in this I I suppose the way I I've shaped product teams hasn't necessarily changed that much over the last few years. Because I think some of those qualities are almost universal in a way. What I've seen in really good product teams or prop, and at this point I'm not necessarily talking about the whole product squad. I'm talking about the product management and the UX roles. And I know they're they're different disciplines, but there are similarities. I think there are almost these like universal qualities that I like that I look for because I've noted that they tend to be there with better product folks, right? And that's things like adaptability, resilience, pragmatism is a huge one. Um, something I've come across a lot in retail in particular is you do get that flavor of products person who's maybe come from a, you know, a more pure product company, um, like I did, probably, and has read all the books, has been to the conferences, you know, is really passionate about that, but hasn't quite figured out how to apply that in their context. And again, that's something that I think happens through experience, also good judgment, which is that, you know, you can't convince a room of retail marketers, for example, to do something your way because you read a great article by some great product guy in Silicon Valley, right? You've got to figure out, you've got to take the time to think, how do I apply this back to this context? And how do I flex on that purity? So, my point around resilience is for me, the good product people are the ones who come into my team and are able to flex, you know, between some of the roadmaps going to come from you and your team, and you're gonna get to do discovery and you're gonna get to do things in that sort of more, you know, pure product way. Some of it is gonna get dictated by commercial realities, commercial pressures, the trading calendar. Most retailers operate seasonal businesses, right? Like there are things that are just gonna come from other places. You've got to be a collaborator. And I just think that that as a quality, it's a really easy word to band around, but that ability to truly collaborate, truly influence your peers, that's universal.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

Can you teach that? Or is that something just it's a human talent? You either have it or you don't.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

I think you can teach it because I certainly feel that, you know, there's elements of it that will be innate. I mean, that's probably a debate in itself, right? Um, but I do think you learn again, and maybe, maybe it's me. I've learned a lot of the things I've learned through failure. Like I've got great examples of like where I just got it completely wrong and the next time I did it differently for that reason. And I suppose on the collaboration point, I learned this early on in retail, which was, you know, I'd got into this more senior position. And I suppose I know we might come on to talking about, you know, the difference between being an individual contributor and becoming a leader. And for me, that step into leadership was really interesting because it took me a while to figure out that at that level, my role isn't just to manage up and down anymore, but it's really to manage sideways and to manage my peers. So in a team where I'm the only products person on this leadership team and I'm interfacing with, you know, the rest of that organization that leads that retail business. So whether it's the traders, the buyers, the operators, the marketeers, my role is actually to influence them. Yeah. Not just to say, well, you know, our boss said this, so you're gonna do it. And I know that sounds really simple, but I see a lot of people making that switch from IC to leadership, thinking that the job title is what's gonna give them that power, not realizing that actually, you know, getting the job title, getting the promotion, that was like the first tick. The hard bit is then how do you start to realize a lot of these businesses, especially in retail, are relationship businesses. People will work with you, will be influenced by you if you're really clear on, you know, what's in it for them, how are you helping their teams? And again, just hiding behind, I'm the product person, I get to decide, or that sort of flavor of product doesn't work in those environments. And I think again, understanding that our roles are to collaborate, like we're not saying, let us do this part of the job. I think it's bring us in so we can do this with you and we can talk about this great. You've got this idea that you want to put in front of a customer. What are the other ways that we can help you with that? What are the other ideas? How do we prioritize those ideas? How do we figure out what the small tests are that mean by the time we get to the investment part and we build this thing for real, we build the right thing. I think approaching that much more in a collaborative way is something you can learn over time. But I guess coming back to the original question, those to me are qualities that you need to have. And some of that is product specific, maybe in that context. But they're they're also just good qualities to have as a as a person in a business, right? Resilience, collaboration, empathy, they're all just really important soft skills that I think you you should have, and that will help you then move move further in an organization.

SPEAKER_02 27:33

Yeah, that's great, Fabrice. And I think that's really useful for our listeners as well, in terms of people that are starting to really think about how they neck the next steps in their career. I guess something you touched on that I'd really like to explore with you is that leadership piece, like that transition into leadership. So, how did that come about for you? Like when did you know you were ready and who took the chance on you as well? Did that come from an internal move and then externally? How did that how did that play out?

SPEAKER_00 28:03

No, for so for me it was um it was actually my move into retail. So I think I was in a position uh at in my kind of um at Sky where there was an opportunity to kind of go to that next level, but that next level came with in many ways doing a version of the role I was doing just with a better job title. And this other opportunity that was on the table was going to a completely different vertical um going in at that same level. So it was kind of moving from a senior product lead to a head of product. Um, and I I just think I jumped because I thought it was the opportunity to also test how transferable my skills were, which was something that was important to me personally. Um, and that was how I made that.

SPEAKER_02 28:47

And did you want that move? Did it naturally happen? Was it something that you got you went, okay, leadership is the route for me?

SPEAKER_00 28:54

I did because I think I I really don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed being an individual contributor. And and one of the things I will always I still miss today is you you've got to ask yourself, and I I may have not asked myself this enough, but it's how much do you enjoy leading your product versus leading other people to lead their products? And there, I know they're just words that all sound the same, but it's a massive difference because all of a sudden, you know, the excitement you might get from that chat in the morning with your Scrum team about, you know, all the problems on the backlog, why things are a certain way, some user feedback that's come through overnight on the App Store, you know, getting into the guts of why really solving that problem, you know, working with your UX team on like figuring out how you make that flow work. I mean, again, I I touched a bit on earlier in my career, I got to do some hardware product management stuff. You know, again, like being in a conversation where you're designing a remote control, like that was really cool. Um, that's very different. And you're there's a closeness there that you have to be willing to, you're gonna lose that if you go into leadership because all of a sudden you've got people doing that, and you can no longer be the person that's gonna interrogate that product or that flow. And and also, I mean, look, there's probably, and I've worked for some, there are leaders that do try to keep that level of detail. You're you're I don't think that's great for your team's empowerment. Like I'm sure you want your your product leads to be owning those products and to be the and but every once in a while it's figuring out now how do I get the right information that I then need to pass on because your your role then at that leadership level becomes much more about you know dirty words like politics, you're managing, you know, my my role is to clear the runway for my team to enable your team, to enable my team. I can I can and I think that's not that's not for everyone, right? That's you've got to enjoy that. You've got to enjoy the, you know, a lot of your role is gonna be talking to your peers, as I mentioned already, managing them, helping to get them to understand what product and UX do, why they're important, when you should bring them in. You know, you're constantly, and again, I think this might be unique to a world, uh, an area like product, which is not always that well understood in in, especially in retail, you're constantly having to go to people's senior leadership team meetings and explain what you do and what your team does and what the roadmap looks like, and you know, how they can engage with you, how they can collaborate with you. You've got to enjoy that side of it and and almost get to a point. I had a friend, um, a product, uh, a product friend um who once told me this great analogy where she sort of saw it as like all of a sudden her product was her team. Yeah. And that's really stayed with me because I think that's such a great analogy to like that is actually the switch. Yeah. Whereas, you know, my product used to be that that app on someone's smartphone or phone. Um, all of a sudden it's my organization, my team. And as you go up a level, that product begins to change. Because initially it might just be a couple of product areas and some scrum teams. And over time it becomes quite a few big departments because, you know, as you as you go up in product leadership, you you might be looking after all of design, you might be looking after an experimentation function as well as product, as well as maybe some delivery areas, right? So it's it's how does that product then come together? Um, and the problems you're solving are more in that space rather than the product your customers are using.

SPEAKER_02 32:32

Yeah, I I mean there's so many similarities um in in what I do as well, just in terms of you know, you're running a desk one minute and you're you're leading big teams the next. And you know, it's not about that particular placement anymore or market, it's about making sure that you're enabling the people, setting the vision, setting the roadmap for them to go and be successful. Um, and it's it's not for everyone, is it? But there's going to be a lot of people who listen to this that want to go on that journey. So, what would be kind of your biggest advice to somebody who's looking to take that next step into leadership?

SPEAKER_00 33:07

I'd say it's I'd say a couple of things that help are, and again, right, my this is my experience, my opinions, but also from a from a very context-specific place. Um, you know, and it might it might be different if you're lucky enough to work at like a really cool tech company uh in the in Silicon Valley or whatever, right? So I'm talking for my experience as a retailer. I'd say pragmatism is a huge one for me. Like you've got to start to recognize early on that the people you're speaking to day in, day out as a leader. So, you know, if I think about the leadership team I sit on today, you know, some of my peers are they run entire, the entire healthcare division or, you know, all of trading for boots.com or, you know, I'm, you know, I have colleagues who run big functions in loyalty, marketing. A lot of these teams, you know, they've got their own problems, their own massive organizations to run. They haven't got time to learn all of my lingo and all of the things that I care about as a product or a designer. Um, how do you make that pragmatic? I mean, I I've made that point earlier, but start to really speak the language of that business, that customer. How do you help them? I think that's really important. Starting to get really interested in that bigger picture, the overall um reality of the business you operate in, right? So it might be that you really know this part of your tech stack or your experience or your app, but actually you don't really understand how it connects to everything else. And I think that becomes really important if people are going to start to trust you to lead much bigger areas. So, yes, I'm building, you know, I might have been the product lead for the mobile app, but moving into a different product space then suddenly gave me this completely different perspective. Because again, if I follow that now TV example, like the people who were using the setup box were very different consumers to those that were, you know, jumping to the bleeding edge Chromecast or at the time, right? I'm I'm aging myself here, but you know, very different customer. And again, you start to realize that as you go up, go up the organization, your peers and the people above them care about very different things as well because they're suddenly saying, well, actually, a big part of our base are those customers. And when you're building over here, you need to not alienate them. And just again, being able to demonstrate that you care about that, you understand that full end-to-end journey, you understand why the marketing teams need to do this, you understand why every once in a while they're not going to follow the perfect product rule book that you've put in place, and you figure out how to work with them on that. I think again, those are all things that are really important that will help you get to the next level.

SPEAKER_02 35:50

Okay. So AI. How is it impacting product? Lots of questions in here, but uh tell me your view. Where where are we at with AI today? And then maybe we can talk a little bit about where we see it heading, but what what's happening in your world specifically and AI?

SPEAKER_00 36:13

Um, I think it's a really exciting time actually for and and again, like this is from from my perspective with both product and UX teams and the experimentation teams that that I work with, I think it's suddenly bringing to the surface almost like it's it's bringing us closer to what I guess I described early on as that more pure product and UX track. Because all of a sudden, in a world where anybody can build, and I suppose, you know, again, you've got to take that with a pinch, I think. There's a lot of hype out there. I think you can vibe code, everyone can vibe code. You might be able to get to a prototype a lot quicker than you would have before. I think you still need very smart, very good engineers to build you scalable, secure, production-ready software. Um, you know, so I'm not suggesting you'd ever replace that discipline. I think you what you're able to do though is suddenly maybe get to a better conversation because you're no longer just talking about ideas with a blank sheet of paper. You might actually be able to say, here's what I was thinking of, here's what I've tried to do with the customer journey, let's now pull it apart. I think that's a much better place to start, especially if you're in that collaborator mindset where maybe you had a conversation with your one of your marketing directors, they had this idea. If you're able to go away and very quickly come back with a mock-up or a prototype, which, you know, again, UX teams and UX research teams were doing that before, but maybe that helps us accelerate some of that and do it quicker. I just think you get into a place where our roles are going to be just as much about what we don't build and that judgment around where do we not waste our time, waste our precious resources, and what we actually do end up building. And I think that's just a really interesting space for product in UX to find itself in because we're almost at the center of it by default, helping to have those conversations. Because again, it's easy to think, well, does that mean the marketing team can now just go and vibe code their thing and they don't need you anymore? I think you're you're still then not necessarily tackling the problem that there's a lot of dogma there. There's a lot of, you know, we're gonna build what we understand based on what we've done before. That agnostic element that I think good product and good UX teams bring that can ask those hard questions. Have we thought about this? Are we doing this for the customer? Because they're not necessarily wedded to the same KPIs or the same pressures, right? Um, I think that's still still gonna be really valuable. So I think it's exciting because I think it's gonna accelerate some of the things we're able to do today. Um, I think from both sides, right? There's kind of the things you can do for the customer that that will be quicker, like prototyping journeys or pages or or experiences, but then also automating some of our tasks as well. You know, so again, it makes me laugh when you're approached by tech providers who will try to sell you the dream. Like, you will no longer need to write user stories. And I'm like, okay, well, actually, first of all, that's not just what products should be doing. If you're just writing user stories, you're probably not doing the full, the full range of your role. But like, isn't that great that I'm suddenly going to have a tool that's gonna help me do that quicker? Yeah, or maybe take it to the right level of detail for my engineering team so it that part of the the funnel goes faster. You know, I can spend more time doing other tasks like the thinking, the judgment, the things that I think are important, managing my my stakeholders, collaborating, all the soft skills we touched on. Yeah. Um, I think it's a really exciting time. Scary as well. Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_02 39:52

But have you seen any um downsides at this point?

SPEAKER_00 39:56

I think the downsides are probably that we're in this slightly it's chaotic, right? Because it's moving so quickly. And I think it's the knee jerking that a lot of um, and especially again in my industry, I feel like it's very easy in a boardroom, you can imagine people picking up the latest, you know, feed from retail week or something and saying, oh, you know, so-and-so have launched an agentic trial, so-and-so are doing this with AI. What are we doing about it? You know, and there's there's this tendency, I guess, at the moment, and we've we've seen it before, to be fair, with with other technologies. Um, although I do think AI is different because it does seem to have proliferated much quicker than things like the metaverse, which we were talking about a couple of years ago. So I do think it's different. But it's the more than ever, we need to empower our teams with that judgment, to be in that conversation early. Because if I just take like one example, you know, one of the big, the big things we're talking about in retail today is agentic commerce. And again, this idea that, you know, through these large model companies, a customer may be able to transact entirely from, you know, whether it's through voice or through typing something in a chatbot, all the way through to placing that order without necessarily having visited our site or our app, you know, and that disintermediation is quite scary and is real. Um, but I think again, you know, it's do we knee-jerk to partnering with one model company? Do we, you know, do we decide to go down this path with this provider? I think there's a lot of decisions like that that we've got to be careful because things move so quickly. Yeah. You've already seen in the last six weeks where, you know, initially it was all going to be open AI. Now it sounds like Google's gonna play a much bigger role in that. Um, you know, you've got the others that are also in there, the the the four or five other big model companies. So again, I I sort of start to think about it more as should we be building that experimentation, test and learn discovery muscle that a lot of our product teams know and can help help us with, help our organizations with, because it's going to be more important to try different things, uh, discount the ones that might not work before we commit to building things that might be irrelevant in six months because it's moving so quickly.

SPEAKER_02 42:17

Yeah. And is has your view on what good products looks like changed significantly over the last couple of years as this has evolved?

SPEAKER_00 42:29

I don't think it's changed. I think it's I think what this rapid proliferation of AI and and this technology does is it starts to sharpen a couple of things that were already there for me. Like the importance of data. I think for for too long, and retailers are all guilty of this. I'm sure I'll get challenged, but you know, we have so much consumer data. Like other businesses would dream of having the amount of data a lot of retailers have. But have we really invested foundationally through our tech stacks in the right platforms? In, you know, we we've spent a lot of time as retailers focusing on the things that customers could see and interact with, like let's rebuild the website. But did we really spend as much time rebuilding the data foundations underneath the website? Probably not, right? And I suppose, as product people, therefore, are you more likely out there in the market to find people who've built websites, apps, you know, again, those front-end experiences versus product managers who really understand the data, the data layer, the data pipelines, how to work with data engineers versus software engineers, they are different. So I think it's interesting. It's like the need to sharpen our data skills has been there for a while, but it feels to me like this is accelerating it. Yeah. Because we need to get that right for a lot of this stuff to work. I think some of the some of the things around pragmatism, being able to ask the right questions, being able to interrogate your stakeholders, even very senior ones that are going to be throwing these questions. At you, again, those soft skills that influencing becomes even more important in a world where you're suddenly going to be hit by all these possibilities and all these things you could be doing. Who's going to play the role of mediating and making sure that there's an organized there's an organization to that chaos? Um, so I think I don't necessarily think it's it's changing the role, it's probably sharpening those areas that I could already see were important. The the final one I'd say is, you know, again, a lot of product people still come, I think, from the business side of the fence a lot or the operate, the operation side of the fence, and they get in retail especially and get put into these product roles because we thought, well, you know, you know this part of the business, so you could be the person who translates it to technology. And I think increasingly being able to understand technology at a slightly deeper level, being technical enough, I don't mean you have to be a coder or an ex-coder, but I mean being able to have that conversation with your tech team in a more meaningful way, being able to almost represent them to the rest of the business in the right way, again, is it is a skill that I think we're gonna need to sharpen in a world where everyone has access to this stuff. Yeah. Increasingly, your, you know, your content designer, your marketing colleagues, they are also able to vibe code. They are also able to use these platforms to understand how things work. You've got to be able to kind of have skin in that game.

SPEAKER_02 45:29

Is there a danger that it will go back to how it was, right? Just del people become delivery people again because it's all you can become a lazy product manager, right? Just tell me what to do and I'll go and deliver it. Is there a danger if you haven't got the ability to really interrogate, to question all of the skills that you hold dearly, then that is gonna really impact ability?

SPEAKER_00 45:54

I think to an extent that that's always gonna be a risk, but I think linking it back to the question around what good looks like, I think you've got to also, you know, being a self-starter, being someone, you know, who's not afraid to make things happen without being told what you need to do, which again is a is a great culture. I think in businesses like Sky, like there are a lot of retailers that operate like that where you're not necessarily gonna be given the answer and just go and deliver it. Yeah. But I think you've got to create your role a little bit. So I guess to those product managers, I'd be asking if you if you're happy with that, fine. But if what you've been saying for a long time is you want to seat at the table or you want to be involved earlier, or you know, you want to be able to really bring to those teams that experience around experimentation, discovery, you've got to make that happen. Here's your opportunity to go use the tools to make that happen. And again, right, for me, the where the pragmatism comes in is in retail, you might come into a role where you'll get to do that for 50% of your roadmap. Maybe when you start your role, it's you know 70% of your roadmap is dictated to you. The other 30% you can actually apply some of some more of the product craft to. Maybe over time success looks like you can get it to 50%, you can get it to 60%, right? And but you've got to make that happen. And I just think um, and I will, you know, there is of course all the doom and gloom stuff about AI. Um, there's a lot of interesting things out there, but I think if you remain positive and you embrace these new technologies and figure out how to use them to your advantage, that's gonna put us ahead from those that don't, right?

SPEAKER_02 47:34

Well, we were saying before, weren't we? Um, you know, uh a narrative that I'm hearing a lot is is actually allowing us to do more, it's do so much more and actually accelerate these roadmaps faster than we ever thought we could. Yeah. And new ideas, new features means more people are needed to help to deliver that. Yeah. Um, so I I I I I embrace that um as a message and hope that that is absolutely the case. And I guess it what what what everything you've just said to me just highlights and um reiterates the importance of the human side of product at its core, the critical thinking, the pragmatism, the human, the empathy, and people that can utilize and embrace both uh are going to be the winners in the long term, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:21

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 48:22

Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_00 48:23

Because again, it's the you know, if if you're the person in the room that's able to separate yourself a little bit from that really hard commercial um metric, or that really hard operational reality or constraint, if you're the person that's able to ask the question, and a lot, and I say this a lot to my my product teams and and my UX teams as well, actually, um, is a lot of what I'm hoping to see is that you're just asking the right questions, whether it's to your engineers, to your fellow designers, to your peers, or to your business SMEs, it's like, are you the person in the room that's just nodding along? Or are you actually saying, but what about this? What about the customer? Have we thought about this? And what if they because again, that's the human part of it, that's the empathy. Because if you've got the luxury, frankly, in a lot of product teams, we've got the luxury of like, we're not the ones who are being necessarily held accountable to hit a really difficult number. We are um indirectly, right? By of course, we link our OKRs and things within the products we build back to a commercial metric, but you're not necessarily the person at the coal face of that. You're not the person who's got to deal with really awful processes and systems in a warehouse, for example. So you're the person that's able to say, hey, like if you took yourself out, if you had a magic wand, how would this work? Right. Or you've got the luxury of kind of taking yourself out of the dogma for a sec and help those teams think differently, that's hugely powerful if it's used in the right way.

SPEAKER_02 49:53

Yeah. So as we start to come to a close, I'm really interested to kind of explore with you um like your reflections of of your career today. I know there's still a long way to go and lots to still achieve, but if you were starting your career and product today, what what would you do differently?

SPEAKER_00 50:11

I think I I I mean, I think it's also it's a difficult one to it's a tricky one to answer because in many ways I'm reflecting on how this role existed but was called something else in technology. Yeah. And I suppose now you're coming up in a world where there's a lot, you know, there's a lot of information out there. Yeah. There's the podcasts, there's the books, there's all of the great stuff that you can really immerse yourself in and you will learn a lot. And I would recommend.

SPEAKER_02 50:42

Yeah, you guys were figuring it out along the way, right?

SPEAKER_00 50:44

Yeah. And um, you know, and we were looking to kind of a lot of it, I think, came from from tech companies in the US, and we were looking at them and trying to figure out how to apply that to our context. So I think I think I'd probably say it's immerse yourself in all that, listen to the podcasts, right? Read the books, but always keep an eye on how do you apply that back to your context. And I'd say at the same time, immerse yourself in the other things that are important, right? So, in a way, if you work in a retail business, for example, and you're amazing at quoting all the great frameworks, and you've you I don't know, you've done um discovery and other businesses and you know how to run a discovery sprint or things like that or a design sprint, great. Teach people how to do that. But at the same time, go and spend time in that warehouse, go and spend time in the call center, go and speak to customers on the shop floor, go and understand what your peers are struggling with. Because I think the the best product people in my experience in a retailer don't necessarily sound like product people. They just sound like really good retailers, really good, savvy operators who understand that business inside out. So I'd say, you know, one of the things I would do is probably go and try and make more time for that side of it as well. I think that's really important. And then the final point, I've touched on it a couple of times, but I do feel that it took me a little longer, maybe in my career, to get really, really into the weeds of it. I did early on, and then less so in the middle, but I think that um getting a lot closer to the engineering and the technical side, I think becomes a real um, it's really powerful because I think it allows you to have the right conversation with your tech teams. It shows that you care and they respect your craft if you respect theirs. Um, also, it's just like really interesting sometimes to be able to challenge someone on that level. So, you know, you got we've got so many tools nowadays that could allow us to do this. I mean, you could use Claude, and Claude could teach you how to code. It'll take a number of weeks, but it might at least teach you a little bit about how it works. What's that path to production look like? You know, how does how does something go from someone's computer to a server to in product? I mean, those things are are really important and valuable things to know as a product person, in my experience. Um, I'd go and immerse myself in all those things.

SPEAKER_02 53:06

Nice. What what what it'd be interesting to hear your your thoughts on this. Maybe it's a massive question, but like what what's exciting about retail for the next 10 years? Where do you what what do you see happening? How is it gonna look 10 years from now? How are my kids gonna be shopping differently to me?

SPEAKER_00 53:25

I mean, it's tough because I don't have a crystal ball, and I think a lot of people would love to have one at this point in time. And and again, this is my there's there's the kind of I go to a lot of you know retail conferences and and hang out with a lot of retailers, obviously. Yeah, um, and we talk about this quite a bit. I think one of the things at one extreme, as always, I think when there are new technologies, people are very binary when it comes to new technologies. They're very like, oh, it's it's all or nothing, right? And I think if you look back, is that really how human beings work? Like, you know, 10 years ago, mobile was gonna replace desktop. It hasn't, right? And people are still using both. It depends on the context, right? I suppose you go back maybe 15, 20 years and e-commerce was gonna kill the store. Nobody was gonna go to bricks and mortar stores anymore. I don't know that that's true. A lot of retailers are opening new stores. And I think similarly, you know, agentic is not gonna kill our apps. I think it's just another channel that stacks. It's another way for consumers to enter a journey based on their messy context, right? Human beings are messy. Like you might think of something, you're on the couch, you're browsing for it, you might then remember when you walk past a store, you might go in and look at it, you might put it back down, we'll retarget you with an ad, right? Like there's so many, so many ways that you might end up making that purchase. Um, so I think that's really interesting. I think it's almost like how do we not look at these things as black and white binary things that are going to destroy other things? I think the channels are stacking. As retailers, the challenge is we need to be good at all of it. Yeah. Right. Like this new channel comes along, which unfortunately there is the threat of disintermediation. You know, how do you make sure that you're still retaining your customer? You're still creating that loyalty, that retention, even though maybe 60% of the journey happened on platforms you no longer control, right? You your customer came to you because they went through a YouTube and Reddit um rabbit hole and then saw something on TikTok and then eventually walked into your store or visited your website. I think there are new challenges that we're gonna have to solve, but I think ultimately it's just that it's fragmentation that we have to deal with. So, how much is shopping going to change in the future? I think human beings like to shop. Yeah, we like to go visit a store sometimes. I think the context, the mission, right, had this in the grocery space. You've got some people went fully online with their grocery delivery, some people still like to go to the store, put a family in the car on a Saturday, go to your you know, out-of-town supermarket. Some people like to pick up something on the way home. Like increasingly, our role as retailers is to meet the consumer where they are in that moment. And that's not easy, but I can't see a lot of that necessarily shifting greatly. I think again, it's gonna be, you know, if I could, depending on the product, depending on the category, if I can talk into my phone and replenish an item without having to visit a a page, I might do that for some stuff. I might not buy a couch like that, right? Yeah, that's a different purchase. Like, so I just think again, it's gonna be, I think in the future, we'll just have even more of this. Yeah, have even more ways of of um of interacting. And the important thing for me is if we've learned anything in the last 10, 15 years of like having phones in our pockets and supercomputers in our pockets, I guess, is convenience and time saving. Those are the things we care about as consumers. Yeah. So as long as we continue to think about it in that way, I think our kids, given how much, and again, speaking for my kids, I'm sure yours are similar. The way they context switch, the way they kind of multitask in a way that I think our generations didn't, or maybe not to the same extent, time is gonna be really important. Time, convenience, those are all things that we're gonna have to continue to be very good at. So I'd focus there too.

SPEAKER_02 57:14

I'm still waiting for the, you know, that scene in minor minority report where he walks through them all. Yeah. I was hoping you're gonna say that for Brees.

SPEAKER_00 57:22

I mean, that we could probably do some of that now, right? It's whether, again, it's that's that hype of it. And again, right, I lived through this a couple of years ago when we were when all the hype was around the metaverse. And just to be clear, I don't think the metaverse and AI are the same. No, no, well, but I remember we built this amazing prototype at the time I was at Selfridges where you could navigate one of the collections through this kind of metaverse type environment as like a sphere. And you could choose as a customer, like, I'm just gonna go down the regular, you know, e-com catalog style, go down a list or look at the products, or I could enter this room where I'm actually seeing the t-shirts on these virtual um hangers, and you know, I can I can walk around the room. It was great. The engagement stats were incredible because customers would go and play around with it. I don't think it necessarily drove better conversion. No, because arguably, like, is that an easier way to shop digitally? I'm not sure. Like putting it, you know, navigating a catalogue, putting it in my basket, that's a paradigm I understand very well. Having to kind of gamify it through this virtual world just made it that slightly more gimmicky and difficult. But there might be times when you want to do that because someone's created something really cool that you want to experience. So again, I think it's gonna be we're gonna have to do all of it.

SPEAKER_02 58:36

Are you playing around with some of that stuff?

SPEAKER_00 58:38

We're yeah, we're playing around with well, more I'd say our focus at the moment is really on um that agentic commerce piece, I think is gonna be huge. And and it's you know, again, I don't think everyone's gonna move to it. Not, you know, I I can't see um even some of my friends, people I know, you know, family. I can't see that they're necessarily gonna move to this way of shopping, but I think there will be a demographic that will, and we need to be there to solve that problem for them.

SPEAKER_02 59:05

I love that. I love that it's it's not about a fundamental change, it's just about improv incremental improvements across a lot of different things.

SPEAKER_00 59:13

I think it is.

SPEAKER_02 59:14

Yeah, amazing. Fabrice, it's been really, really great to talk today. I've really, really enjoyed it. Um, if any of our listeners have got any questions and would like to approach you directly, would that be okay?

SPEAKER_00 59:26

Yeah, of course. I'm on LinkedIn. Great. Um, that's probably the platform I use the most. I'm terrible on other social platforms, so I don't bother mentioning those. But yeah, happy to just connect with you.

SPEAKER_02 59:37

So many great takeaways and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 59:40

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 59:41

Thank you.