How I’ve done it

Pladia

Pladia emerged as a standalone product business inside a 13-year-old design and technology service company. It had been in development for over two and half years, while the market was being tested, primarily seen and used as an internal tool for the service teams. The product business officially launched in September of 2024 with multiple product lines.

Standing up and launching a separate business required:

• Auditing everything that had been built to evaluate market viability.

• Defining the product offerings, pricing, and business model.

• Transforming the operating model from project to product.

• Redesigning the organizational structure and team topologies.

• Building the necessary teams to support a product business; product design, product management, customer success, and growth.

• Introducing strategic lifecycle planning, roadmapping and goal setting.

• Implementing a measurement framework, and embedding a sufficient product mindset.

AgriDigital

AgriDigital develops solutions to real-world problems in agricultural supply chains, bringing transparency, efficiency, and trust by combining inventory, data, and finance into one platform. When I joined, it was 7 years old, and they had tried several strategies, including using blockchain to store grain records and replatforming from a monolith to a microservice architecture.

Their suite included several disparate products solving overlapping problems for different end users in the agricultural supply chain. This created some challenges:

• Confusion in the market

• A sub-optimal pace of innovation

• Competitive threat from newer, more nimble entrants

• Development inertia impacting growth experimentation

The strategy to solve those challenges included:

• Maintaining one core, integrated platform to respond faster to market conditions and competition.

• Building an ecosystem of capabilities, apps, and integrations, rather than disparate products.

• Defining product offerings and pricing for various market segments.

• Focusing on customer experience as a core differentiator.

Store No. 8 - Insperience

Store No. 8, Walmart’s innovation arm, acquired Spatialand, which became Insperience, to develop VR capabilities to transform the future of commerce and bring innovation to merchandising, inside Fortune 1. The future of retail is immersive, VR merchandising. At Insperience, we built a VR Commerce platform to allow brands to merchandise their physical products in VR, for consumers to make confident purchase decisions, having experienced them spatially. There is nothing worse than buying furniture online or in-store only to discover at home, it’s the wrong size for the space or doesn’t suit the other elements in the room. In a V-Commerce experience, consumers can browse from homeware collections, place items in a room, simulate their own living spaces, and add them to a virtual wishlist.

To accomplish this, we had to overcome some challenges:

• Photo-realism is an important aspect of the success of VR merchandising; furniture must be structurally appropriate, and color and textures need to be accurate to the physical items they represent.

• The VR environments that consumers explore must be architecturally sound to look and feel like actual homes.

• Unlike the web and mobile, VR doesn’t have decades of standardization of interactions to leverage when designing immersive experiences.

• A built-for-purpose design system was needed to codify the most appropriate interaction paradigms for the use case.

Additionally, VR is not ubiquitous in people’s homes. A location-based system was required to meet consumers where they are, namely, in-store. This included:

• Designing, fabricating, and constructing physical VR pods with integrated technology for operating at scale, deployed in stores.

• A custom-built VR control system, which was hardware agnostic for remote deployments and live monitoring.

• A queue management system to manage usage, with throughput and live operations tracking, and optimized wait times for consumers.

Fullscreen

Led a year of R&D for consumer products at Fullscreen to build a subscription video on demand platform, which contributed to the $250M+ in enterprise value at exit to AT&T and The Chernin Group.

R&D efforts included:

• Identifying the target demographic, their motivations, online behaviors, and video consumption habits.

• Defining product features & benefits, and product positioning in the competitive landscape.

• Building the consumer product suite across platforms.

Key learnings and innovations:

• Research indicated the targeted demographic was accustomed to short-form video, due to the proliferation of mobile video products.

• Long-form was considered anything over 5 minutes.

• To delight consumption habits, duration-based search was implemented: snack, grub, binge, along with mood-based discovery.

• This allowed consumers to watch content appropriate for how much time they had available and how they were feeling.

• Enabling the creation of GIFs directly from the player to be shared out to social aligned with observations of online behavior.

• This innovation removed existing friction at the time and allowed for the behavior to occur more easily.