I'm here to today to talk about mastering the art of prioritization in global b to b to c businesses.Now that sounds like quite a mouthful, and indeed it's no mean feat. So I'm here from Ocado Technology to tell you a little bit about the journey that we've been on around product prioritization. So you might have heard of Ocado Retail if you live in The UK. They're the online grocery company that delivers foods in blueberry covered vans around the country. You might not have heard of Ocado Technology. And around, I think, seven or eight years ago, Ocado decided to sell its end to end technology platform to grocers worldwide. It's called the Ocado Smart Platform, and it covers every stage of an online grocery journey, an ecommerce front end, last mile automation, supply chain, planning and demand, and fulfillment both hardware and software.

So it's a huge platform, with, which ultimately offers a better online grocery experience for customers and a more profitable one for retailer. And I'm joining from the product organization. So I'm a product director within ecommerce within the really driving customer growth for our partners, and I'm here to talk to you a little bit about the Wild West of prioritization. So we work with 13 retail partners around the globe. And as you can see from the map, they're a really diverse bunch. We operate in all continents with very different consumers, competitors, and demands on retailers and their own individual strategy. So how you prioritize as a product is already pretty complex. We have only been around we've been around less than ten years, and in our early days, we really operated as a start up. And what that meant for the product is that our product direction was driven by the commercial deals that we sold.

So as we sold new retailers, their priorities became the product priorities. Now as we're moving to a more mature phase, we're actually getting on the front foot around really how do we improve our platform for all of our partners and drive strategically profitable growth. And so I was tasked to lead a prioritization framework for the whole of ecommerce to help us make those decisions. And I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the journey that we went on to do that. So how do we approach it? Well, first of all, we had some big naughty problems to solve. We knew that we wanted to prioritize the things that would be of highest value to the product, but there were differing opinions of actually what that value metric was across the organization.

And even once we'd worked out what the definition was, the question was of how do we actually measure that. Ocado is a large and complex organization, not to mention its global reach. So getting stakeholder buy in was pretty critical as part of this process. We also knew that whatever we built had to balance the strategic versus the tactical. While we were solving big priority problems for the future, we also had to deal with the here and now short term tactical requests and how we could how we could prioritize them to make sure we worked on the most important things. And probably the most important part of a prioritization framework, what we would say no to. We'd spent the last five or six years really trying to say yes to everything and struggling to fit it in.

And now we were moving to an era of saying no to work on the highest value things. So how did we approach it? The first priority was to be truly cross functional. Attempts at prioritization in Ocado had happened in silos before and, as a result, hadn't really worked. So we took a truly cross functional approach. We had a working group from product engineering, commercial teams, account teams to really test and iterate on the framework and approach we were trying to use. We also knew there was no point in reinventing the wheel. Prioritization is a a challenge that many organizations have around the world, and so we interviewed a bunch of senior leaders in b to b to c product organizations to understand how they did it.

And the unvarnished insights that we got, was were far better than anything ChatTibT could deliver. But we also knew who we were. And so while we learned from the best, we also understood the elements that were unique to Ocado to inform this framework. We also took a long, good, hard look at ourself and actually discovered that we were doing prioritization quite well in certain parts of the organization. And we really sat down with those teams to understand what they were doing, how they were doing it, and why it was working, whilst, similarly, identifying a bunch of the challenges that we face that had stopped us from prioritizing effectively. And we didn't just break down silos within our working group. We also wanted to make sure that it fitted within the broader business initiative. So working very closely with things like product planning to make it fit. How did we approach the framework?

Well, the first thing that we spent a lot of time talking about was metrics. What were the right things to measure and how important were each of them to each other? And we brought in experts within the business as well as without outside the business to test and validate that. We also had to make decisions on how we traded off partners against each other. Now 13 clients is quite a lot of clients, but also not that many clients. And so how to balance their different needs and voices and the different needs of different geographies and different consumer types was something that we needed to make an active decision on in collaboration with our account teams. One of the other reasons our prioritization framework had fallen down previously is we were prioritizing things of totally different sizes. We were prioritizing big strategic problems against tactical initiatives.

And as a result, it was actually really hard to operationalize. We also, as we were building the framework, really started to, test and validate the data we were using to assess how value how valuable our initiatives were. And we're definitely going on a journey around data. We have much better data in some parts of our product than in others. And so the question was, how do we also build a plan to get that data to help the validation, but also validate in an environment where maybe data is missing. And I think that will always be a challenge for any product organization. And the final thing was how do we find objectivity? So product managers voting for their own initiatives, you definitely get some bias. And if nothing else, because that you those product managers know their initiative better.

They know the detail. They know the data. So how do you create a framework that allows you to compare them consistently and and objectively in one universal scoring framework, and that is what we have attempted to do. So how have we approached it? Continuous test and iteration. It was not a big bang release. We trialed it with lots of different, parts and forums in the organization. We really needed to get a handle on governance. So what were we really prioritizing? Who needed to be in there and in what role? Who was inputting the value? Who was validating it? Who was making the difficult decisions? How frequently would this happen? So when was actually a critical question. We needed to have the right frequency to be responsive and agile, but anything too frequent would mean that we were constantly shifting our priorities and actually wasting time and slowing down.

And then how? There was a lot of laborious work gone into the amount of work required in our internal documentation to enable us to make these decisions. Let me say that it definitely felt like a mix of art and science. Some things we were getting much more granular and quantitative on, whereas some things we were very much being more creative in how we found solutions for them. And I alluded to it earlier, but no big bang approach. It was about solving these problems one by one and knocking them knocking them off, incrementally as we went. Where are we now? Well, I think a really big shift that is happening internally is a focus on outcomes rather than features. We're prioritizing the biggest outcomes and data we wanna go after and then saying what features can help us get there.

And we're really embedding a culture of experimentation to actually help us assess, and evaluate that. We're certainly getting better alignment across and between geographies. And, actually, something really exciting about being a global business is one, feature or capability that works for specific geography is also actually very interesting for others. Critically, it surfaces difficult discussions. I feel like now we're really clear on what the trade offs that we are making rather than saying yes to everything and then seeing what happens down the line. But I think the most important thing is we're not there yet. We're definitely learning as we go, and I think we set out with the destination of a clear prioritization framework.

My main takeaway is that it's definitely gonna be more about the journey. So that's a little bit about how we've approached prioritization.