Last Tuesday night was ‘Product Night’ in the latest of our series of Burns Sheehan Tech Talks, hosted at Gousto HQ. In partnership with MOO, Birchbox and Bloom & Wild, we had a great panel lined up ready to discuss everything involved in shipping physical products in the digital world. As always the pizza and drinks were flowing and our audience arrived ready for an evening of networking and digital insight. Read on for a recap of the night & videos of some of the evenings discussion!
Our moderator for the evening was Gousto's very own Iain McNeill, VP of Digital Product. With a focus on family and sustainability, Gousto are the UK's leading recipe box and are using industry-leading technology to continue to innovate and grow whilst delivering a first-class service to millions. Iain's vast experience in product spans over 8 years and he has previously held high profile positions within the likes of PhotoBox, Notonthehighstreet and Betfair before his time at Gousto. He had a number of hot topics on his mind for our panel to discuss, including the strangest problems they have faced working with both physical and digital operations!
Our excellent panel for the evening was made up of...
Calum McGee: Technical Product Owner at MOO, an online design & print company. Shipping physical products is quite literally the game as he looks after MOO’s shipping and fulfilment platforms, using data to drive smarter decisions to improve delivery experience and make fulfilment more efficient for MOO and its customers.
Ankita DMello: Ankita is the Senior Product Manager for Birchbox UK & Spain, which offers an efficient and personalised way to discover and shop for new beauty products. Prior to joining Birchbox, Ankita worked as a Digital Consultant at Accenture where she learnt how to implement new technologies for large scale companies.
Joe Tinston: Joe is VP of Product & Retention at Bloom & Wild, the UK’s most loved online florist offering a range of flowers and gifts through the letterbox. Prior to that, Joe was Director of Ecommerce and Digital Marketing at onefinestay (acquired by Accor Hotels) and has previously worked for Tesco and eBay.
The panels fascinating discussion drew in lots of questions from the audience, with one attendee curious to hear about how the customers check-out experience is measured and related back to calculating retention rates, as well as how the businesses maintain quality assurance checks within their complex supply chains.
Take a look at some of the evenings insight in the videos below!
In the product world where we are bridging the gap between physical and digital, Calum explains the issues in defining product when it has so many different meanings in different contexts. 'Physical' and 'e-commerce' are two key terms used by MOO to differentiate the product after the online sale has been made and the manufacturing process has begun.
Joe from Bloom & Wild explains how services such as subscriptions and gifting add even more complexity to the definition of product.
Ankita explains the importance of communication when managing stakeholder expectations and prioritising company wide business goals.
And here are our panel describing some of the strangest challenges they have faced when digital and physical product operations collide!
We had some excellent feedback and Gousto donated a 1-month free subscription for the best audience engagement on the night using our event tag #BSTechTalks which encouraged some great audience participation.
Thanks to Iain, Calum, Ankita and Joe for their insight on the night and special thanks to Tom for his help in organising the evening. If you’re interested in attending our future events, please follow and join our meet-up page: https://www.meetup.com/Burns-Sheehan-London-Events/
