How I helped senior leadership go from days of waiting to instant competitive insight — by building a product from the ground up.
Imagine being the CFO of one of the UK's largest retailers. You want to know, right now, how your stores are performing against a key competitor — across products, customers, and store footfall.
The old process meant reaching out to an analyst team, explaining what you needed, waiting days while they pulled data from multiple internal systems and external providers like Kantar — then going back and forth on clarifications. A simple question could eat up a week. By the time the insight arrived, the window for action had often closed.
The data existed. The problem was there was no self-serve way to access it — quickly, confidently, and independently.
This wasn't a data problem. It was a product problem. And it needed a product solution.
I joined at the ideation phase. My contribution spanned the full product lifecycle: helping define what the product should do, shaping the data narrative it would tell, deciding which indicators would genuinely matter to leadership, and co-designing the experience in Figma before a line of code was written.
Once wireframes were validated with actual business users, I led technical delivery — architecting the backend data layer, integrating 5+ internal and external sources, and guiding the engineering team to ship something that felt fast and trustworthy.
Mapped leadership's actual decision-making needs, not assumed ones
Defined data stories, KPIs, and which indicators actually mattered
Designed end-to-end in Figma before engineering began
Reviewed with actual business stakeholders. Incorporated feedback.
Led technical delivery end to end and launched
We navigated real ambiguity at every stage — from what to measure to how to build it. These were the decisions that mattered most.
Rather than over-engineer upfront, we validated the concept on Tableau. Only once we confirmed value did we rebuild as a scalable web application. Classic MVP thinking — learn before you invest.
The hardest integration challenge: making Kantar (external market data) talk to internal systems. We architected a unified aggregation layer that made this invisible to the end user.
We debated standard industry metrics vs. proprietary indicators specific to this retailer's competitive context. We ultimately built both — industry benchmarks for comparison, custom metrics for insight.
We added an LLM layer — feeding structured data to generate plain-language narrative insights alongside charts. The "so what" became instantly visible, removing the last mile of friction.
The Cockpit launched successfully and was immediately adopted across the senior leadership team. The response validated the product thinking — and generated new questions we hadn't anticipated, which shaped the next iteration.
Directors didn't just use it — they engaged deeply enough to ask new questions. That's the signal that a product created real thinking, not just answered old ones.