Rickpal Soor | Senior Consultant | Retail Reply, London, UK
Version 1.1 | May 2025
Introduction
Faced with the challenge of aligning over 20 distributed teams, one of our clients partnered with us to improve collaboration, consistency, and delivery outcomes. By embedding our Product Managers into their ways of working, they achieved a 98% delivery rate of quarterly objectives — a 28% improvement over previous performance, sustained for over nine months and continuing.
How did they do it?
Through The Power Of Modern Product Management
In an era where digital transformation is reshaping industries, Product Management has become a critical function in driving innovation and business success. But digital transformation isn’t just about adopting new technology; it requires a fundamental shift in how companies operate, deliver value, and engage with customers. Product Managers (PMs) are central to this shift, ensuring that digital initiatives align with both strategic objectives and user needs.
Understanding The Role Of The Product Manager
Product Managers are responsible for the entire lifecycle of a product. They serve as the crucial bridge between business goals and technological capabilities, collaborating with engineering, design, marketing, sales, and operations to ensure products are not only technically sound but also commercially viable. Through strategy, roadmaps, and deep stakeholder engagement, PMs help organisations navigate the complexity of digital transformation while keeping customer experience at the forefront.
Aligning Stakeholders And Managing Change
Effective digital transformation starts with alignment. PMs are facilitators, ensuring that stakeholders — from C-level executives to developers — are working towards the same vision. They manage expectations, build consensus, and guide teams through resistance to change.
With our e-commerce client, one of the first challenges was inconsistent tooling and fragmented reporting processes. Each team stored data differently and translated outputs manually to try to maintain consistency — an inefficient and error-prone approach. We worked with them to move from on-prem to cloud hosting, consolidate tools, and establish shared standards, ensuring a single source of truth for planning and execution. This significantly reduced overhead and improved collaboration.
Driving Agility And Adaptability
In rapidly evolving environments, agility is essential. PMs champion iterative, flexible approaches like Agile and Lean methodologies that enable faster learning and decision-making. You’ve likely heard of MVPs (Minimum Viable Products), but we also leveraged MVPts (Minimum Viable Prototypes) to validate ideas even earlier using low-cost experiments.
For our e-commerce client, this meant creating alignment on “definition of ready” standards, ensuring that all backlog items were well defined, estimated, and grouped into clearly named sprints. Teams could then move in sync, with full visibility into who was delivering what and when — allowing rapid iteration and dependency management without sacrificing standards or missing deliveries.
Customer-Centric Innovation
At the heart of digital transformation is a focus on the customer. PMs use data, user research, and tools like Opportunity Solution Trees to map strategy to execution and uncover the highest-impact problems to solve.
With our client, we helped restructure teams around specific customer problems and functional areas. This shift allowed teams to stay focused, innovate within their domains, and reduce distractions from unrelated workstreams. We also supported them in adopting continuous discovery practices and regular, lightweight research touchpoints with real users. Rather than relying on occasional large-scale research efforts, teams embraced a co-creation mindset — validating ideas early as they developed them and making smarter, faster, and cheaper decisions as a result.
Customer-Centric Innovation
Digital transformation produces a wealth of data, and PMs play a key role in turning that data into actionable insights. From customer behaviour to performance metrics, effective Product Managers use prioritisation frameworks (like RICE, DIBB, Effort vs Value, etc.) alongside discovery tools to guide decisions with evidence rather than assumptions.
For our e-commerce client, once we had clarity on tools and team structures, the final piece was setting outcome-based metrics that tied team efforts to company-wide objectives. We introduced frameworks to help identify the most valuable opportunities and consistently measure impact. This gave teams confidence in what to focus on and leaders’ clarity on where value was being delivered — and why.
Conclusion
Product Management is at the heart of successful digital transformation. By aligning stakeholders, driving agility, keeping the customer at the centre, and grounding decisions in data, PMs play a vital role in turning strategy into reality.
Our work with clients — including the transformation seen in the e-commerce industry — shows just how powerful this role can be. As digital expectations continue to evolve, the role of Product Management will only grow in importance, shaping the future of business, one iteration at a time.
Get In Touch Today
There’s no need to work alone. Retail Reply's Product and Delivery Consultants are helping clients unlock the full potential of their digital transformation journeys by using the above techniques and more. Whether you are starting from scratch and creating a new product area, or want to improve a long-standing product, we work with all types of businesses to create amazing customer experiences that drive efficiencies, sales, and improve key business metrics.
Should you like to know more, reach out to us on LinkedIn or connect with our partner, Richard Gillings (r.gillings@reply.com).