Partnering with a Global Apparel Brand to Speed Up Product Creation and Strengthen Cross-team Collaboration
Role: Product director/Engagement Lead — Initiated a multi-year partnership, lead the cross-functional team
Team: 16 cross-functional experts (UX Designer, UI Designer, Data Scientist, Full-stack engineers, QA) between London and San Francisco.
The Challenge
Fashion development is a highly collaborative, tactile process. Yet the merchandising, design, development, planning, and commercial teams were working across scattered text tools that didn’t match how they actually worked. This led to slow development cycles, last-minute rework, and even more friction once travel to showrooms became difficult during COVID.
My Contribution
I initiated the partnership and set up the cross-functional team. I led the discovery work, bringing clarity to how merchants work day-to-day and where the real blockers were. We interviewed users across teams, mapped their processes, and translated everything into one clear service blueprint. This gave everyone — including senior stakeholders — a shared understanding of the end-to-end workflow for the first time. I brought structure, alignment, and momentum to a complex, multi-team effort — turning scattered processes into one coherent product and guiding the organisation toward a faster, clearer way of working.
From Insight to MVP - the first 12 weeks
In 12 weeks, we designed and launched an MVP with hundreds of products to test the riskiest assumptions. It landed well, grew quickly, and soon needed a new structure as adoption scaled. I guided the team through rapid usability improvements and kept the project aligned across time zones through async research, prototype testing, and ongoing user feedback.
The next 18 months
The tool matured into the single source of truth for all main-line products. It now enables teams to build seasonal assortments together, visually and in real time, with clear permissions and collaboration modes.
Impact
Significantly shorter time-to-market for new products
Fewer late reworks thanks to shared visibility and better alignment
Stronger ability to react to market trends with faster learning loops
Company-wide recognition — our ways of working became a model showcased at internal conferences
