# Beyond the Checkout: How Product Leaders are Redefining the Retail Experience

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** ProdPad
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo
- **Дата:** 05.12.2025
- **Длительность:** 55:22
- **Просмотры:** 38

## Описание

Discover how today’s retail product teams are using AI and experimentation to build better, faster, and more connected shopping experiences.

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

All right. Hello everybody. Come on in. Welcome. I know that everyone is just settling in and getting everything loaded up now. So, we're going to get started in just a few moments. But in the meantime, I just want to say hello. Big welcome to people who are joining. Find your way over to the chat in Zoom here and say hello. Let us know where you're calling in from. Let us know what you're looking to get out of today's session. Say hi and let us know that you're here. We're going to give people a moment to come on in and find their way around. Find your way to the chat, say hello, let us know where you're coming from. Find the Q&A as well because we're going to be using that to capture any of your questions. You'll be able to upvote and see other questions that are in here. And we'll kick off in just a moment. We're going to let some people get settled. And as I said, welcome folks who are just joining. We are going to be kicking off in just a moment. Thanks Andrew for making sure that the chat is working. That's great. Anybody else around? Say hello. jump in, let us know where you're calling from, and we look forward to chatting with you today. All right, I can see some folks coming in now. Dan from Winnipeg. Amazing. Hey, Dan. I'm also from Canada. Some people don't know that, but I'm from Toronto originally. And I can see that we've got Orion from India. Awesome. Welcome, welcome. Come on in. Say hello. Um, glad to have you here. If anybody wants to use the chat for networking as well, feel free to drop your LinkedIn. why you're here, what you're looking to learn. That's always useful stuff. And also find your way around to the Q&A section because that's where we could drop our questions and we'll be able to go through them as we chat today. But let's start kicking off. We have this is going to be an excellent session today. So, this is actually a new format. As you know, we run a series of webinars here at ProPad, the product expert series, and we run these things and have done for years now. So, we've got a huge back history of ones that you can go through. Today is going to be a deep dive into the retail product management world. And we're running it as a panel where we're going to be asking questions and diving into everyone's experiences. And so these webinars are always with a focus on the expertise, learning, the sharing. All of our past webinars have been recorded. Today's will be recorded as well, so you'll have access to that. And you can see the whole back history of all our webinars at prod. com/webinars. You will have a chance to ask questions. So feel free to jump into the Q&A and drop your questions and feel free to use the chat to connect with your fellow product people here today. For this webinar, we have partnered up with Gate One Consulting, who is one of ProPad's partners on a day-to-day basis anyways, but is working with us on this webinar to help make it as magical as it's going to be. Right? So, where we've got Tasa here from Gate One who is going to I'll do a full intro in a short while, but she's going to be our moderator and is going to help guide us through. In the meantime, before we jump into the guts of the webinar, I want to talk you through a little bit of what we do here at ProPad. So, ProPad is a tool that was built by myself and my co-founder, Simon. We were both product people and we needed tools to do our own jobs and they simply didn't exist. So, we started putting something together and now it's being used by thousands of team around the world. And essentially, it's a product management platform that helps you make sure that you're building the right stuff. It helps you stay away from some of the bad habits that you might be falling into and helps you craft better product management processes that ultimately lead you to reaching your goals, meeting your outcomes, getting the right products built, and also being more confident in your decisions as you do it. It brings the whole team on board with the process. So, it's a tool that's absolutely free to try. We've got a free trial area. We have a sandbox which is preloaded with existing data and road maps and other examples of how product management systems work. So jump in, give it a try and let us know how it works for you. I want to introduce Tasia who's here with us from gate 1. She's a transformation leader with deep expertise in digital strategy and product management. She's led large-scale operational change across sales and service teams using datadriven insight to untangle complex problems and elevate the customer experience. She brings a strong mix of strategic thinking, crossf functional leadership and a passion for building better, more innovative ways of working. So I want to hand over to Tasa. Everybody say hello and Tasa is going to kick us off with our panel, introduce our folks today and we'll go from there. Thank you so much for the introduction. I'm really thrilled to be here. So like Janice said, I'm Tasa. I'm part of Gate1 based out of New York City. So I see a few of you in New York. So, Gateway Consulting is a digital and business transformation consultancy. We have a lot of different capabilities, but the ones that I'm most passionate about that we get to collaborate with ProPad on are around

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

really all things product. So, product strategy, product management, and also blended with a really strong change management foundation because we all know that people and change is at the heart of every successful transformation. So, really excited to be here and dive more into product and retail. I also wanted to introduce our amazing panelists that we have. They all bring such unique and diverse experiences. So, we're in store for some really insightful conversations today. So, our first panelist is Anna Chuckerbove. She brings a rich background in product leadership, retail strategy, and customer experience. She's previously worked at Dun and Sansberries and spearheaded the roll out of multiple digital applications. And fun fact, her career actually started in a handmade chocolate factory. So, Anna, you've really been creating delightful experiences from day one. We also have Andrew Wgner on our board who is the lead product manager at Macy's where he drives omni channel shopping experiences across discovery, checkout, and fulfillment. With 10 plus years of product leadership experience, he scaled crossunctional teams and launched market differentiating solutions at both Fortune 500 retailers and high growth startups. Outside of work, Andrew likes to take on iron man triathlons and enjoy spending time with his three kids. So Andrew, you take endurance to a new level outside of product. And we also have our final panelist, Fabris Koular, who is the director of product and technology at Boots, one of UK's largest pharmacy health and beauty retailers, where he drives digital transformation and customer- centric innovation. He brings over 20 years of experience in product strategy, omni channel experience, and large-scale retail technology. And fun fact, Fris told me that he enjoys embarrassing his teenage kids by DJing at local events and community festivals in North London. So, next time I'm in town, I would love and invite Fabric. Um, but first off, massive thank you to everyone that is able to make it and all of our panelists. I know this is the busiest time of the year for retailers. So, I really, really appreciate you taking the time to be here with us today, whether you're watching this live or on the recording. Thanks for your time. And quick disclaimer before we dive into some of our panelist discussion. So, a lot of the opinions and views that we want to talk through today are the opinions of the individuals and not necessarily tied to the companies, but I wanted to start out with Black Friday. So, Black Friday, Cyber Monday just recently happened and we're seeing that it's no longer just a one-day event, right? We're seeing this stretched into a week-long, month-long a digital event that is AI powered with different shopping experiences and also social media playing a huge role in the way that buyers are making decisions. So for anyone tuning in live, please feel free to drop in the chat what you bought for Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Always looking for some good deals and some excuses to do some shopping. But for our panelists, I want to start out with how does this Black Friday season compare to previous years? What trends or what shifts are you really seeing this time around? We can start off with Andrew. — Yeah, sure. Thanks for the intro and appreciate that. Great question. Coming off the busiest time of year for many retailers. Yeah, so looking at Black Friday and Cyber Monday, even Giving Tuesday, I think what I'm noticing, not just at Macy's, but across, you know, my own personal experience within shopping and looking for different deals or gifts is that things are really starting earlier, right? So, it's not just Black Friday, right? Stores aren't opening at midnight and, you know, it's focused on a lot of instore and in-person shopping. I think there's a lot of retailers who are spreading this out. You're seeing decorations at companies like Target and Home Depot come out earlier, right? So, these seasons are kind of getting longer. And I think all the retailers are really trying to figure out how long can we push it before it becomes too unacceptable to be seeing back to school things before back to school or Christmas trees before Christmas. And I see a lot of daily deals, right? So it's like 12 days of deals with many retailers trying to get people to come back after a specific date, but also trying to promote that discount and trying to help that customer see this value. That's what I'm seeing. That's a really good point of just like personalizing a lot of these deals for that specific brand because you're competing against so many different other brands as well. Anna, what have you been seeing in the market? — I think value is just continuing to be such a big factor when people are shopping. So, are they still going for the big ticket items? Are they thinking a little bit differently about what's important to them? You know, Black Friday is very closely, as we know, followed by Christmas and pur strings are stretched heavily. In the UK, it's been a challenging time and it's becoming even more challenging and I think we are seeing those challenges hit stores and hit our online shopping habits and I think we're having to think differently as retailers. I think the other thing is that people are also savvy shoppers and is the Black Friday deal really a deal? Are you really getting a discount? Because we are not

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

necessarily getting the true picture as a consumer and I think people are also quite savvy to that. They're checking across different capabilities on the internet to see whether they're actually getting the best deal or not, but actually have prices changed and now there's more tooling that tells you the history of what the prices have been. So, am I really getting a better deal on Black Friday itself? So, we need to think a little bit differently as to how we approach these key campaign time periods and how do we make sure that the we're being really true to the campaign and true to the customer so they're getting the best deal. That's a really good point because even now with AI shopping agents, it's so much easier to research and really find out if you're getting the best deal in the market. That's phenomenal. Fabe, what are you seeing in the market? — Um, well, for us, I mean, Black Friday is really big and I think I agree with a lot of what's been said. I think it feels like it starts earlier definitely in terms of shoppers starting to look for deals and start to plan. I guess they're, as you said, they're savvy. I think I agree with that. So, we sort of saw that demand starting to peak a lot earlier maybe this year. I do agree that in the UK especially, it does feel like Black Friday is a really good opportunity to get all of your Christmas presents out of the way and again benefit from those deals. So, I think that behavior was definitely comes through in our data where it's things like slightly more expensive purchases, electricals, those kinds of categories seem to have done really well for us. The other thing I found interesting outside of my direct business was just the variety of deals and businesses that I thought were I guess on the one hand I could say jumping on the Black Friday bandwagon but I thought there was just so much out there on the day. I mean I was getting emails about discounted airport parking and I was like oh wow okay that's a Black Friday thing too now. So, it's just really interesting to see concert tickets, music merch, like just that variety of I think businesses that are kind of jumping onto this is interesting and I think it does say something about the consumer and the consumer being offerled and deal driven increasingly. — That's a really good point. I didn't realize how many more options and newer brands are kind of capitalizing on this opportunity as well. Maybe we can shift over more to digital investments and omni channels. I know retail has been in an interesting space for a while now because a lot of focus has been moving more towards quality over quantity meaning pure stores and more emphasis on creating an actually meaningful experience for our customers and I think a lot of brands are starting to double down on omni channel strategies and what that really means and they're making more digital investments than they have before. So for example, I know at Macy's you guys have been undergoing the bold new chapter strategy to kind of modernize operations and experiences. So Andrew, I'm just curious from your perspective, how have you been able to balance digital innovation and still maintaining a strong physical presence? — Yeah, this a big one especially for a company like the size of Macy's, right? So I think one of the biggest keys to like the success of this is actually like company setup and funding, right? So execs need to be top down saying that this is a priority, right? We're going to steer this big cruise ship and we're going to head this way. And at the end of this trip is an experience that ties physical stores to digital, right? We had earnings today. Our CEO Tony every earnings is mentioning, you know, the omni channel customer experience like word for word. So it is very important and I think that when we have that buy in from the executive level then you can push from inside of your product org for different things to prioritize right because what we're trying to do on the digital side you know offer customers that kind of like instore experience of I walk into the store you're greeted by someone how can I help you what are you looking for so how can you help emulate that on a website and I think tying all of that together is really how you succeed in really like any kind of like omni channel business is really just like that executive level buyin and then that helps you push for the right product features or feature sets or even brand new products that really tie these experiences together. Yeah, that makes sense because I feel like with in-person shopping, it's a little bit easier to create that emotional connection and loyalty feeling, but with a lot of advancements in personalization, I think we can start creating some similar aspects to loyalty online as well. That's a really good point. I know Boots is also prioritizing consistency across physical stores and all of their different channels. So, Free, what has been your experience balancing this digital and physical aspect and what are some challenges and opportunities that you're seeing? I mean, I think, and this isn't specific to Boots, I feel like in the retail industry in general, I've been in a few retailers now. I feel like we've been talking about omni channel for a long time, but I don't know that we've actually put that much action behind it until more recently. And I feel that's because for a while, a lot of exec and leadership teams still sort of felt

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

like it was one or the other. And there was still sometimes even like this inner competition of like your online teams competing with your store teams for numbers and for share of wallet and things like that which is kind of absurd when you think about it because as a consumer ultimately you shop your mission in terms of how convenient it is for you at the time and if the retailer is doing it right I think you're enabling your customers to sometimes browse things on the sofa and purchase them or decide to click and collect in store or decide to purchase in store if you're at a train station or in an for like for boots. So, understanding how to create that connection I think has become increasingly more important and is something we definitely talk about more. And I think where we're starting to see a lot of value is also to think about like where in the experience is it important. It's not and again this might be my opinion but I'm not sure that everything has to be connected. I think if you're connecting the data layer up, if you're making sure that your customers are recognized, your loyalty follows you regardless of channel, those kind of really important sort of customer touch points that then lead to the purchase. I think as long as you're connecting those things up, the customer will feel like they are recognized regardless of how they choose to shop with you. I think that's a really important point that we need to start focusing on. And when you start to move into the importance of data with AI and agentic commerce like again I think it just says those are the areas we need to invest and focus in and I feel like leadership teams are starting to get that and starting to invest in the right places. — Yeah. So you mentioned a really interesting point about sometimes it does make sense to create that seamless experience and sometimes it doesn't. I'm curious when does it not make as much sense to create that like seamless omni channel experience? difficult question, but I suppose there are things that you're never going to replicate to the same level. That's — true. — In a store, right, to your point, that experience of going into a store, being able to speak to someone, there are elements that you can do digitally, and some businesses have done that fantastically well. But again, when it comes to like trust advice, if you want to go speak to a pharmacist in store, like those are all things that are slightly more difficult, I think, and there's a local aspect to that as well that you have to think about. So I think it's picking and choosing like what are those parts of the journey and those missions where omni channel is really important and maybe focusing on those first rather than thinking you have to connect everything up. I think that's sort of where I was going with it. — No, that makes complete sense and giving the consumer enough variety so they can pick what's convenient to them at the moment. That makes sense. And Anna, so based on your experience at Dunham and Sansberries, what are some like really big digital investments that you've seen create some meaningful change or business impact? Um, so I would have to say I think one of the biggest things that's happened is at Dunelm they have finally joined the 21st century and launched an app and that has been a really big change for them. So that app launched this year. It's been really exciting. There's been some really good feedback about it. there's lots more that they are planning to do and come through and they're also dedicating more team uh resources to be able to build out those capabilities and instead of it being a small trial and a pilot it is now going to have dedicated people working on it which is really exciting they are quite behind the curve on this but I think the aim is that they accelerate quickly so they've been talking through what that plan could look like the different phases and then how can they actually understand more about what their customer needs are because they don't have a loyalty scheme at the moment. So again, behind the curve with other retailers, but hoping to catch up on those things. I think what's been really interesting when I look at some of the retailers I've worked at, so for instance, you know, I mentioned Denelm, Sainsbury's, they've been doing more and more with Nectar, which is their loyalty scheme that they're joined up with amongst other retailers. And one interesting capability that's come out of Sainsburries is Nectar 360 Pollen. And what they've called it is their unified retail media platform to drive brand growth. And the key thing about it is that it's been built inhouse at sainsburries. And it's a unified platform to help understand shopper behavior. And their aim is to drive some uh sales real results. And they're actually starting to onboard clients onto the platform as well. So the theory being that Nectar 360 Poland lets you plan and book and activate campaigns across your media touch points. You can connect it in store, online with off-site media. You've got a unified experience. You've got personalized customer journey being supported within that. They're using AI powered audience building. So, they're using their first party data within the Nectar scheme. They're using Gen AI tooling to basically create target audiences. They can target what they're focusing on. They can create conversational AI. They can do segmentation. they can start doing analysis about what's happening within that. And they've also got multi-touch attribution modeling so that they can look at different touch points. They can visualize how campaigns are performing. They've got dashboards. I

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

swear I am not working for them. But what I'm saying is you have a retailer like Sainsbury's that is known for having your loaf of bread and your pint of milk and on the tech side they have gone beyond just getting a promotion to a customer. They've gone beyond having a loyalty scheme. They are now building platforms and growing their tech capabilities. So it's something to look out for. I think more and more retailers will be using more and more tools like this and they'll see how they can monetize it. So they're not just thinking about what they're doing behind in their bricks and mortar. They're going beyond that. But one thing I did want to touch on around digital capabilities and investments is M&S. Also another company I worked for a very long time really unfortunate that they went through a terrible cyber attack. So I think the key thing to call out there is you just need to be making sure you're protecting the brand that you're working for, but protecting the customers at the heart of it and just doing much better in that vein. So I'd say be bold, be brave. It's okay to fail fast and learn faster when you're building things, but we do need to think more about the wider business impact and how quickly you can recover and restore customer confidence if things go wrong. often being on different programs of work. Cyber security can be an afterthought. Oh, you've got to do some pentesting. So, it's important to bring people on the journey when you want to launch a new innovation. How do you truly get there? — That's fabulous. I love that. It's really about building loyalty and trust. That ties in really nicely to this next topic around AI and how it's transforming retail, but also just every industry in general. So, I want to dive more into beyond just personalization, how AI is really transforming the retail space because it's no longer about just smarter recommendations, but it's also about accelerating our speed to market and really differentiating from our competitors. I know you mentioned there's opportunities for us to build something in-house versus actually own and own the IP versus outsource. So, maybe we can start out with Andrew. Where are you seeing the biggest transformation in retail with AI and where can AI really help? — Yeah, so I think from the like product management perspective, of course, there's like the product work, right? So day-to-day, how are we actually working? How are we writing stories or documents? There's a lot of tools now that help speed that up. And then other ways that even I've used it is like competitive analysis, right? I can go have an agent go look at competitors and tell me specific information about their features, right? So, does this retailer have a specific filter or what does the homepage look like under these circumstances, right? So, there's this I would say like efficiency play that's been very helpful as of late and then even prototyping, right? So, you have a whole bunch of different tools at our disposal now to actually create a prototype. But I think one of the interesting parts of retail is there's many different pages along the shopping funnel. So it used to take a long time to actually prototype a experience going from one page to the next and then what if you want to go back to that page, right? So all of these efficiencies have been really helpful and then I would also say with in the other parts of the business within retail, you definitely have AI coming into let's say product attribution. So how are things being tagged and labeled? And then that really bleeds into the future of SEO, right? So SEO is search engine optimization, but what's next, right? Which would be the LLM engine optimization and even gentic optimization there. So it's making sure that the attributes of any given product are optimized for how the customer is like really searching. So are they searching in a search tool like Google or are they using JPT or something else? hand where are we then headed next right so where is that technology taking us and our customers and how are customers going to react to that I think we can maybe get into that later and then the other one that I've seen too is probably some enhancements around decisioning right so under certain circumstances what do we do with a product in the post-purchase you have things like returns Amazon has a chatbot right now that you can talk to and actually you could get money back if you don't return it based off of a whole bunch of questions that you ask. Where are products coming from? Where are they being shipped from? Those are really good solutions or problems for AI to help like solution for. So those would be the buckets that I see really AI coming in and giving us some more efficiencies there. The product returns is really interesting and I think even with prototyping it's fascinating how much more techy like a product manager can become to help like engineers speed up the process. — Yeah. So I think right now the role of the PM is really expanding with AI efficiency. So that's awesome. And Boots is also really interesting and was fascinating to read up on just because they have also heavily invested in AI.

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

They had their launch of the first customerf facing Genai chatbot in the UK retail space and I know that was inhouse and there's a lot more use cases within loyalty and dermatology screening that they're also uncovering. And Fabrico from your perspective what other emerging AI capabilities do you see shaping the future of omni channel? — I sort of see it as there's probably two categories really where we focus. So there's all the parts of I suppose where you'd be able to use AI to make your processes and your internal ways of working more efficient. So whether that's you know we create a lot of content that then needs to be formatted. We need to create different variants for the different channels. We've got a lot of teams that have to do quite a lot of work. Some of it is quite detailed grunt work. Frankly, the ability now in a lot of the tools that we use to be able to do some of those things sometimes on the fly where you're able to create different variants of the same branded asset or whatever it is or the same article that you're publishing on like our health hub where we publish a lot of like health advice and link it to the right kind of products and well-being for example. So I think there's a lot of opportunities there to start to really automate and get the teams to focus on the important parts of that rather than spending all their time creating like five versions of an image or whatever they might do. I think there's some of the things that Andrew's mentioned clearly prototyping automating some of what we do in the product and UX teams is also great. I think there's also on the customerf facing side, we have played around with the chatbot and one of our internal data science teams actually helped us build a first version of that and it's been really exciting to see how customers use it. So I think there's definitely that sort of advice. How do you do things like customer service, product advice, those kinds of things that you could do through a chatbot or through other means? But I think the bit that's really starting to get interesting for us is thinking about that agentic side of it and pros and cons of that really. How disintermediated will we be as a retailer when a customer is interacting with their agent? And you know we're a multibrand retailer. We sell our own brands as well. But again, how do you work with the LLMs, the different platforms to make sure that you're being recommended, your products are coming to the top of those kind of recommendations, but also that you're easy to find, that your site is machine readable. So, there's just so many different elements of it that we've got to think about. And I think the reality is as retailers, like certainly in the UK, I feel like we're at this inflection point where again, it's not all or nothing. We've got, you know, a retailer like Boots. We serve every generation. There's going to be the generations that are, you know, more likely to adopt these ways of shopping and consuming a lot quicker than others, but we don't want to alienate. We don't suddenly want to move everything off an interface to an agentic agent, right? So, it's figuring out how you do both and you continue to do both. Well, I think that's going to be a big challenge for us in the next year or two. That's a fantastic point of that generational divide and capturing that next customer too that we'll get to in just a second. And Anna, I'm curious from your perspective too. Where have you seen AI helping with speed of market? And I know you touched on it with your previous example, but was wondering if you had anything else. — Yeah, definitely. I think people are equally afraid and also curious about how they can use AI tooling and that's probably a good balance for us to have. Businesses are starting to use AI tooling like midjourney. Chat GPT has obviously been around for a bit longer and it's much more prevalent. But co-pilot as well to manage their web content more efficiently. You know, what can they do to progress products more, you know, more products more confidently through their critical path? How can they make the best use of the time that the teams have to get products from concept through to design through to launch in a timely manner and hope that they can go from launching a thousand products a week to 10,000 products simply by automating some of the manual tasks with the help of these tools. So not necessarily changing the brilliant minds that exist within the business but actually making the best use of the time that these people have and using AI tooling to support that. I think machine learning capabilities are now pretty standard within demand forecasting and replenishment tooling so they can ensure that they're getting the right product in the right place at the right time. And I think that's been a sort of key mantra of a lot of the capabilities that are out there in the market from the leading ones that you would see on a Gartner report to even the ones that are emerging new in the market and starting to make a bit of an impact. AI and 3D visualization is also coming through quite successfully to help floor planning and reviewing visual merchandising and layout plans and that's developing at pace across a number of different providers. It's also again to help manage the manual workload and reduce the time frames so that people can make decisions more quickly and also to reduce the number of handoffs you've got across the teams. So if you think about what you need to do when you're planning how your store is going to look, especially from a bricks and mortar perspective, you've got touch

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00)

points across teams like commercial, digital, retail, operations, marketing, supply chain. If you can streamline any of those processes and the handoffs that need to happen by automating some of the processes or actually just making sure that you're not using an Excel spreadsheet to get decisions made, that you're doing it through tooling, there's the right approval layers, etc. you can be much more productive and at the touch of a button you can see how things have progressed and where you're up to. So the introduction of these toolings to just streamline processes within sort of head office and back of store processes is really key. But one thing I will say is you have to take the sales pitch from a solution provider with a pinch of salt. So some of them will say that they can grow their margin grow your margin through their AI pricing capabilities or through their demanding demand forecasting capabilities. But you do have to delve a bit deeper into these presentations and into these promises and be really clear about the benefits that you're aiming to achieve when you onboard AI tooling into your business because these are to support your processes. They should be a useful aid to drive productivity and efficiencies for your teams and they should support them as a part of their day job. And it's your teams that need to focus on driving the business forward. you know that when you're putting through these sorts of changes and I know that we're going to touch on the impact into businesses as these toolings become more prevalent but you need people to feel confident they can trust the output that is coming out of the AI tooling. So the input needs to be accurate, the output needs to be accurate but you need to have people there who know how to drive the business forward and to make the best of these tools. Yeah, I think a lot of people think AI solves everything, but it's really not about fully automating the entire experience, but really identifying those pockets of opportunities that really provide either a meaningful customer or employee experience that can help create some efficiencies. — Absolutely. — Beautiful. Okay, so we've talked a lot about the retail space facing tremendous change and how product is really at the heart of it driving some of this innovation, but technology is kind of a small part of the overall transformation, right? I think a lot of it comes down to the right processes, the right expertise, how you structure your teams to actually deliver some meaningful change. So Andrew, with a lot of your Fortune 500 experience and your expertise in the high growth startups as well, what have you been seeing as the key ingredient for a successful agile transformation and also alignment across the entire organization? Yeah. So, I've been at Macy's for almost five years and we've had multiple consultants come in and help us with our agile transformation and a lot of, you know, massive companies are either in some sort of like digital transformation or coming to the end of that. And I think one of the biggest things that I've seen that has like a positive impact on the acceptance of a lot of like agile practices is really like the an open culture that's really accepting and open to get better and test and iterate, right? And sometimes that can be hard when you're working with co-workers who have been at a company for over 20 25 years, right? It's like the processes haven't changed very much and now you're kind of going in and trying to clean a bunch of things up and focus on making changes for the good. But I think where I've seen things not go well is maybe another way to answer the question is like when people are hyperfocused on what is the process, what is the document, what are the checks and the check boxes that need to be done. It's less about that, right? It's more about how can we test things faster, get things out, are we working on the right thing and then are we hitting the outcomes and not just like output in geometrics or something like that. So when you combine all of that with a culture that's open to hey, we're going to test this out and what does that mean? Not from a product or a consumer standpoint, it's like we're going to change processes for a few sprints and we're going to see if we liked it or not. It's going to be a little uncomfortable, but we will literally hold a retro and then get feedback on it and then change again. But you also have to be okay with being uncomfortable for a few weeks or sprints, right? So, if you can have that culture and if you can help drive that culture as an individual contributor or a leader, it definitely helps bring the whole organization along. — That's phenomenal. Yeah, because I think a lot of these processes should be guard rails but not necessarily slow teams down. And you said something really interesting too around kind of almost like a project to product mindset shift where it requires a lot of like culture and a completely different thinking to really get teams on board. — That's great. And then let's see, Fris, so I know in the world of uh boots with health and beauty, wanted to get your thoughts too, and you touched on this in your last point too, like where does AI fall short with structuring these teams because there's still a lot of instances where we still need that human touch and we need that organizational structure that

### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00)

kind of supports that change beyond just the technical components. So curious from your perspective, where do we still need human touch with AI? I mean, I think probably in lots of places because there's a lot of hype and of course we all know that and to that point that you made earlier, we think AI is going to be the answer to everything, but you still need to see AI as a tool to solve a problem. You still need to spend time on figuring out what the problem is that you're trying to solve, right? Like we shouldn't just think that we no longer need to do that. So, I think we're coming through that where I'm hearing less exec teams going, "What's our AI strategy? " which I used to find quite amusing about 12 18 months ago to actually you know let's go back to the problem we want to solve and is AI one of the ways we could solve that so I think that's a good shift that we're starting to see but there are still elements where this technology is nent the use cases are still nent a lot of it comes let's be honest from four or five key players that own these language models own a lot of these data sets or whatever scrape the internet to find them and I think you've still got to fact check you've got to be sure that the information that you're surfacing back to your customers or inside your business is accurate. I think for us, especially as a heritage brand, a health and beauty retailer trusted in this country for over 176 years, we've got to be careful that like we're giving the right advice that we're using AI in the right way. I think testing and learning when you're looking at like product attributes is probably okay to let the Gen AI get it slightly wrong. But when you're looking at like the ingredients of a medicine or a medical condition like those are all things that are quite serious and we've seen things in the press about chat GPT and others getting it wrong. So I think for me that human touch that where we still sell products where through even our digital workflows we have to make sure that a pharmacist approves the purchase whether you're buying something through like instant delivery like deliveroo or one of those products or through our website we still have that flow because it's regulatory and it's the right thing to do ethically. I think again will we trust AI to automate those processes? I think we're gonna have to tread carefully in those areas because it's just not something you can hand off and trust the machines to get completely right yet. — Yeah, that's a phenomenal point because when it comes to trust like health and beauty really can't make too many mistakes especially in the health space because it really could be detrimental to the brand and that ultimately helps create some loyalty to customers. Anna on your side, what are some lessons learned from organizational readiness and product specific examples for related to the retail industry? What are some lessons learned that you've been seeing? — Yeah, I think there's clearly lots of desire to become agile to be thought of as an agile company to be product. More often than not, you see a little bit of waggile creeping through hybrid, what I like to call fragile, where you're not entirely sure what anyone's doing or how they're working, but you're just sort of making it up as you go along and you try and push something through and you're not quite clear about, you know, agile doesn't mean you don't have governance. a plan. Working in product doesn't mean you don't look beyond the next three months. You should be clear about where what your goals are and what you're trying to get to. You might not think about it in the same way as KPIs, but you should still have your objectives and key results. Are you clear about it lining up to the strategy and the goals within a company? So sometimes some of that can fall by the wayside or it can maybe not be linked together as well as it should be. And the change to land this, the organizational readiness that needs to happen to understand how you go on that journey to become more agile, to become more productentric, it can be quite a big piece to actually deliver and it needs to be thought of as a hearts and minds piece. That's really the key thing and it needs to be thought of as something that needs to happen not just within the tech team or the immediate team that's going to be affected by putting in a new technology capability, but actually across the whole organization. So I'd say one of the key things is really clear communication about the fact that the business is looking to become more product centric having that capability you real sort of clear change management capability to drive the understanding of the change that's coming the benefits it could bring and also how it might affect the day job the positive and the negative be transparent don't underestimate the time frame that you're going to need to successfully embed a product ccentric mindset across the business to become more agile and to think about it in that way and it can't just be agile their name. And also quite often you'll see that everyone's really enthusiastic in the XCO and the directors because they're going to be landing AI capabilities. Technology is going to be becoming more innovative. There's going to be lots of great things that's going to happen, but actually it's not filtering down to the teams that need to really on board into this way of working. And this might be a bit controversial, but sometimes if you want to land some something like an off-the-shelf SAS tooling that you need to pump full of data and then it's going to give you an output and it's going to be off the shelf and you just want to

### [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo&t=2400s) Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00)

plug it in to the capabilities that you've already got. Sometimes working with waterfall might be the most appropriate thing for that particular project and don't be afraid of that. — I love your use of fragile and I love the use of hot takes as well. No, I definitely think that waterfalls sometimes make sense too, which people don't always like it's not obvious always. So that's wonderful. And so I guess I wanted to kind of round us out with what's coming up next. So I wanted to get your thoughts on some of the big bets that are going to shape the retail industry. I want to talk a little bit more about heritage brands versus challenger brands. So Andrew, I'll start with you. For heritage brands, what does reinvention really look like in the next decade? How are some of these traditional retailers able to compete with digitally native brands that might be able to move a little bit faster? — I think how I see it, right? And I think actually Shopify has like a saying where they're trying to build like a 100redyear business or 100year brand. And I think that's a pretty neat goal. What's cool about Macy's is we've been around for like 150 years. So we have a lot of data behind us that we can refer back to and we can look at different trends, understand our customer behavior over many years. And I think the biggest thing for some of the larger brands and maybe legacy brands is really hopefully being product focused and productled which is really at the heart of it focused on the consumer and customer like centricity which in turn retailers need to make sure that they're reacting to the technology but reacting to the customer. It's one thing to just like Fabric was mentioning like execs hammering AI and just talking about it in earnings or board meetings or whatever as a keyword but a buzzword but it's one thing to react to the customer right so there's interesting new browser out there comet I think it's by perplexity you can use that and it has like a built-in assistant in it and you can go to Macy's Target you can go to Home Depot whatever and say help me find X Y and Z and it will actually help you do that. And I think there's going to be a lot of interesting trends where it's like how are customers actually using all of these tools that are now readily available to them very accessible they easily work on mobile devices and then what are the new use cases right so what haven't we seen yet and how do you combine all this stuff together so I think looking at that that's how some of these older brands can really react and react to the right thing by of course talking to their customers and then using technology to solve those problems and picking the right problems to solve and the right technology to actually build the best solution for it. So that's how I see it. — I'll have to check out that perplexity tool. I actually have not used it but sounds really interesting. Anna, I'm curious from your perspective. I know in the beginning we touched a little bit about how we capture the attention of the next customer, right? and that generational divide whether it's like with new requirements on ethical or sustainability. So like what role do ethics and sustainability really play in shaping expectations for that next generation of customers we want to attract? — Well, I think I'm going to state the obvious here, but almost everyone has an opinion about the environment and humanity's impact on it. So definitely it continues to be a consideration for not just retailers but really for any company that's out there. What is their footprint that they what is their impact that they're having? And it's not just younger generations that are much more concerned about the ethical practices of different companies, especially retailers, but they do, you know, that they are known for having less brand loyalty. So, if they hear some bad news through whatever channel they're watching or social media about a company, they're more likely to boycott. profess their dissatisfaction and spread the word and then speedily flip to another brand. And they have the technical knowledge to be able to find what they want very quickly from another provider. So, reputation continues to be a key factor on this topic. and looking at circular design, say within clothing, reducing the carbon footprint, not just on your bricks and mortar store, but actually across your whole supply chain. There's a lot more out there on social media, especially around upycling. It's becoming, it's a big feature. It has been for a long time. How can I take my retro looking bit of furniture and change it and do more with it by just changing the handles, giving it a lick of paint, etc. So even brands like IKEA and Denelm, my previous employer, they've been giving opportunities to customers to get their items fixed instead of replacing them or buying something new or sending them to landfill. You know, it's a key factor to draw customers in. We will help you to make the best use of something that you were going to throw away. And while you're in our store, have a look around to see if there's something else that

### [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo&t=2700s) Segment 10 (45:00 - 50:00)

could go on that end table or shelf. And the focus really needs to stay from the retailer's perspective on marketing. So shouting a lot more about the ethically sourced products. You know, M&S has been doing it for a long time. They have sustainability pledges. They've had marketing campaigns, but have they been clear enough? Do retailers can always do more and shout louder. As an example, I think for about 20 years, M&S has been making fleece jumpers that have been made out of plastic bottles, but I'm not sure they actually shout about how they've been doing it and what they've been doing. the water consumption to make jeans. These are all things that we could be talking about. How are retailers making sure that they're making the best use of important environmental factors that can really impact not just the country that you're in, but actually the country where the products are being sourced from. What are they doing to help over there? And I think also we're seeing a lot of legislative changes being introduced. So we have the extended producer responsibility or packaging tax that's been introduced in the UK. a lot more onus on the retailers and suppliers at the point of buying a product to get the data right. So you're not just having to think about your supply chain. the sourcing of the product. You're not just having to think about your customer and your marketing, but actually data is a huge factor. It can have a huge impact on your business if you are not capturing that information accurately at that point. So are you making the right decisions when you're sourcing your products and are you working with your suppliers to do the right thing? It was quite interesting that there were a number of different factors that was used by sustainability magazine in 2025 when they were ranking their top 250 companies and they looked at the environmental impact a company has, the social responsibility, governance and transparency, but also their strategy and innovation. So that last one continues to be a big focus for retailers. If you're looking at a strategy piece, if you're producing something, you're then tying it into what's going to be on your road map. How are you going to be delivering things that support the business? How are you tying back what you're doing on your road map to strategy and innovation? That's going to be continue to be a key factor I think going forwards. — That was wonderful insight. Thank you, Anna. Staying on this generational divide, I'm curious to get your thoughts on how are loyalty programs really evolving to attract that generational divide. I think it's not obvious and it's definitely something that a lot of retailers have to think about because I think loyalty is probably starting to shift its meaning depending on that generation. You know, are people loyal to retailers? the brands that the retailers sell? Again, you're seeing the rise of Tik Tok shopping. And I know for my teenage kids, for example, they'll just listen to any influencer and think that's the coolest thing and then they'll move on to the next thing. Whereas I think the millennials and maybe the Gen Xers are still thinking, well, no, I want to collect my points. I want to I care about where I buy things. I care about sustainability. I care about those other things. I agree with what everyone else has said so far. I think those things are still important and they play into it. So, I think there's some interesting attempts by different retailers to try and think about is loyalty more about experience and rewarding customers through different means. I think the reality is and for a retailer like Boots being offerled and offer driven is still really important. I think ultimately you know as retailers and the future of retail is no different I think to the past. We have to listen to our customers. I think if you look at the landscape most of us operate in consumers are stretched. We're suddenly competing for share I think a few years ago share of wallet was something we talked about within our industry. I think when you look at the average consumer share of wallet is now I'm competing with you might want to buy concert tickets, you might go out to dinner but you also need to replenish your products and you're you need to buy fragrance for a loved one, right? And all of a sudden I think that the fact is we are competing with all of these different things because everyone is so stretched economically. So as retailers, do we also still have a role to play in terms of, you know, not being afraid to be offer driven, to be trying to give customers the best possible deal where we can and to kind of drive still with that maybe at the forefront. I think that is probably seen as quite helpful in this environment and I think that needs to continue to play into what we do, which is ultimately listen to our consumers. That is wonderful, Freeze, because yeah, I really like this share of wallet because we're not just competing with ourselves, but competing with a variety of different brands that are advertising and the loyalty programs itself are going through like major reinvention because it's no longer about just points. It's about creating that ecosystem value, maybe like validation from Tik Tok, like you said, from their favorite influencers. There's so many complexities behind it. So, that's really interesting. — And I don't want to upset for Bris because I am a loyal Boots shopper and have been for many years. But I think where own brand supermarkets are getting in on beauty, there is no shame in buying Aldi shower gel. You know, that is what's happening. So, you

### [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7c8WE5eYOo&t=3000s) Segment 11 (50:00 - 55:00)

know, we're all being undercut by retailers in different places unexpectedly. — Yeah. — And I want to jump in here because I'm conscious of time, but I want to tackle some of the questions that have been coming in from the audience as well. This has been a really great discussion. Bruno asks, and maybe we can do a quick fire on this. Is there a retail experience innovation that customers aren't yet asking for that you're betting on? I'm not necessarily betting on it fully, but I have seen capabilities where a shopper can go into a store, they look into a mirror that then tells them what they should buy, what they what would look good on them, and so on and personalization through that. So, it's very expensive technology and also it could probably give you some rather unflattering results as well. — So, it's probably something that needs to be built on and worked on. — Maybe something that people might like to try out at home rather than in the store. But definitely something that has been kind of showcased when I've gone to see different innovation companies that are trying to build out this sort of technology. — Yeah. I mean, if augmented reality was going to make a break anywhere, it' be in the retail world. You're already seeing it with stuff like see this in my home and you can sort ofize what something looks like within your own space. — Yeah. The visualizer capabilities. — Yeah. The clothing one will get there, but I bet it's going to go through like an awkward phase. — I think so. — Yeah, I've seen some improvements on the kind of on tryon kind of experience actually within the Stitch Fix company. Pretty new feature actually. their CEO just posted about it recently where you can put a picture in there and then it'll actually help you figure out what are you interested in before they actually ship that box, right? And that's really interesting. So, if you can reduce the amount of products that uh let's say Stitch Fix is receiving back that are returned because someone interacted with that feature and it resonated with them, you can easily kind of track the impact of something like that. So yeah, that's not necessarily something that Macy's is betting on or exploring, but definitely building off of what Anna said there. So yeah, just want to add that. — Excellent. And one last one, I'm going to point this one at Ree because it's about Boots. How has the Boots chatbot influenced the checkout and overall customer experience? Like what sort of things have you learned from that implementation? — Well, we've learned that to be fair, a very large majority of the questions to the chatbot tend to be around where's my order? So what we've learned is that it's a really great way to help our call center teams and reduce some of the workload into them. We probably were seeing less of what we, you know, it's one of those classic kind of things that I think you learn as you test and learn products, right? Like we went into it with a hypothesis that people would want to talk about ingredients and product advice and recommendations and ultimately that's not really what it's being used for. It is in some cases. We're starting to see a bit of a rise in that. But again, is that down to the tool itself or the fact that consumer behavior just wasn't ready for that yet 12 18 months ago? So, it'll be interesting to see how that shifts. And I think kind of hearkening back to the last question as well, I'm seeing a lot of interesting — smaller startups in the space of a skin care recommendation or looking at large data sets on ingredients or products and your skin type and taking like images of your face and giving you better recommendations on the kinds of products you should be using. I think that's going to be a really interesting space increasingly where consumers will be looking for that advice and will start to trust that they could find products that are slightly more almost bespoke for them. And I think you bring that and the chatbot together and potentially you've got something that will be really useful to consumers. — Yeah, absolutely. Well, I can't wait to see what the world retail has in store for us in the coming years. In the meantime, we're out of time. We've gone slightly over time here, but thank you so much everybody. Please say thank you to Tasa for moderating and making this session amazing and as well to Andrew, Anna, and Free for bringing their expertise and sharing with us today. Just as we sign off, as you know, we run these webinars on a monthly basis, sometimes twice a month. So, we're going to be back in January. I'm going to be talking about um how you can balance discovery time and delivery time and not get dragged into that delivery time and become an agency. You've probably heard me talk about the agency trap. And so we're going to rip into that in January. In the meantime, if anybody wants to give ProPad a whirl, we've got a demo that we can show you through and we'd love to take you through a walk through. So give us a shout. And in the meantime, once again, huge thank you to Tasa, Andrew, Anna, and Fris. Is there any final pieces? Does anybody have any follow where they can be contacted or any follow-up notes for the audience? I'm on LinkedIn, but if you don't hear back from me, that's just purely because I'm not as savvy on it as I need to be or as quick to it, but I'll try and come back to you if you have any questions.

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— Perfect. And Andrew's put his LinkedIn in the chat. I'm sure you'll be able to reach Free there as well for further questions. Once again, huge thank you from myself and from Tasa as well. — Thank you. — Thanks everyone. — All right. Thanks everyone. — Thank you so Thanks so much. Take care. Bye for now. — bye.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/47618*