Pillar · Digital Commerce, Apps & Experience
Digital Product & Platform Leadership
Platform rather than point solution — with roadmap, release governance and teams that deliver.
What is at stake for the CIO
Digital capability does not come from projects; it comes from products with a roadmap and a team that owns them. Commission every requirement as a point solution and after three years you have forty applications and no platform — and the running cost of that appears in no business case.
The question behind it
Do we build, do we buy — and who owns the evolution afterwards?
- 1Idea
- 2Build or buy
- 3Release governance
- 4Operation and evolution
Systems and processes
- Product strategy and roadmap rather than a requirements list
- UX and UI as part of the architecture, not an afterthought
- Product lifecycle from idea to deployment
- Leading distributed engineering teams
- Build-versus-buy decisions
- Technical scalability and release governance
Decisions that go wrong most often
- Build versus buy is decided on licence price, not on running and change cost.
- Operating the new application is absent from the business case.
- Distributed teams are steered by utilisation rather than product ownership.
- Releases hang on a date rather than on a quality threshold.
Decisions FirstRetail prepares
- 1Which digital capabilities become products and which are bought.
- 2How roadmap, architecture and release cycles fit together.
- 3Which team setup can actually carry the platform.
- 4Which quality thresholds a release has to clear.
Where the experience comes from
Founding and technical leadership of a digital consumer platform at EarlyBeep, owning product strategy, UX and UI, development, testing and deployment, and leading distributed engineering teams in Geneva, Lisbon and Cluj.
Every name here stands for historical delivery experience from completed programmes. None of them is an endorsement or an indication of a current client relationship. I do not display logos; that would need a permission I do not have.
Other fields in this pillar
Commerce & Omnichannel
Online and store as one business — with one truth for product, price, availability and order.
Enterprise Apps, Fiori & Mobile
Applications for customers and staff, cleanly separated from the logic they sit on.
CRM, Customer Service & Contact Center
One customer view across brands, countries and channels — and a service case that knows the order.