Situation
When taking on the role of leading a seasoned sports betting product team ahead of the 2022 Qatar World Cup, having personally never placed a bet before, the challenge was both a daunting and an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. The task was clear: lead the team to operate as trusted product professionals, evolving the relationship with commercial and marketing stakeholders by demonstrating how effective product teams add value, think, act, and collaborate to deliver progressive outcomes at pace.
Task
This involved moving away from the traditional approach, where product and technology teams were simply given lists of features to build by external teams, and instead fostering a genuine partnership. The goal was to create shared understanding and collaboration across disciplines, allowing product teams to lead on ideation and discovery, thus demonstrating the value they bring early in the process.
Action
Securing buy-in from the Executive team was a crucial first step. Gaining a mandate to reshape accountability for a part of the business generating around £2bn in annual revenue required trust and vision. Being an outsider in the industry did not make this easy, but my experience in different sectors, my knowledge of good product management practices, and a clear understanding of the gaps in the existing function helped to build confidence and support.
Existing business leaders needed to understand the pathway and be open to adapting their ways of working to include product teams early in discussions. Meanwhile, product teams needed to demonstrate their thinking, effectively presenting customer problems and opportunities based on user insights and market needs. Skills in data translation, audience behaviour analysis, storytelling, and alignment with business drivers were critical to establishing credibility.
Result
With product, technology, product design, and commercial teams all in the room, we created the first cross-functional roadmap leading up to the Qatar World Cup. We identified a set of practical, high-value opportunities with a clear strategy to compete for audience share before, during, and after games – following a product lifecycle that aimed to attract, engage, monetise, and retain customers across multiple segments.
Aligning business, product, and technology teams around key metrics enabled us to continually monitor performance and experiment with iterations to maximise opportunities during and after the event. The outcome was not just growth in pre-bet consideration, market share and spend per head, but also improved customer NPS scores and, most importantly, the beginning of a new culture of collaboration between teams that had previously had a transactional and fragmented relationship.
Leading the initial steps of this product transformation over a six-month period proved highly rewarding, particularly when our progress was succinctly validated in exCo forums and through broader feedback from commercial leadership; a true “paradigm shift in relationship,” as our Commercial Director described it.