Chris Metcalfe

Founded Red Oak Agency, a bespoke product consultancy helping organisations transform employee experiences and product delivery through product thinking. Drawing on 20+ years of experience in HR technology, product management, and organisational leadership.

Services:

• Strategy: Partnering with organisations to define and align strategic priorities, develop actionable roadmaps, and ensure measurable outcomes.

• Transformation: Guiding teams to adopt a product operating model, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and embedding continuous improvement practices.

• Workshops: Designing and delivering workshops on innovation, discovery, and service design to unlock big ideas and drive alignment.

• Coaching & Fractional Leadership: Supporting individuals and teams with hands-on leadership, mentoring, and capacity-building.

Primark is a leading high-growth international clothing retailer, employing more than 80,000 people in 17 countries. I led the P&C Technology product management function and transformed the team from a reactive project-mindset team into a customer-centred product-mindset team.

Product & Strategy:

• Created, aligned and embedded a product transformation vision and strategy for the P&C product domain

• Defined the P&C product portfolio, mapped and prioritised the overall P&C space with senior P&C leaders

• Partnered with P&C stakeholders to define the business outcomes that need to be achieved. Established north-star metrics to measure the success of the transformation and mapped the product roadmap accordingly

• Achieved stakeholder alignment on the critical product capabilities needed to achieve the vision

• Defined the desired holistic customer experience, and defined the path from the current state

• Partnered with Finance on the creation of business cases for team capacity growth & technology investments (£24M)

• Steering committee member for major P&C technology investment programmes

People:

• Mapped the gap between the agreed product lines and existing teams. Partnered with engineering and delivery to define and source funding for the necessary capacity

• Team culture workshops -> addressing historical issues, building trust and psychological safety, re-contracting on process and ways-of-working redesign

• Addressed how work and teams are structured and organised to align to the agreed business problems

• Assessed skills gaps. Individual coaching and career / development plans

Process:

• Cross-functional leadership on ways-of-working within Technology, and with P&C.

• Reset on expectations with P&C -> re-contracted to new ways of working.

• New processes based on reset roles and responsibilities.

• Drove accountability for outcomes, and necessary conversations around team engagement and processes.

Docebo is a high-growth market leading learning technology company headquartered in Milan, Italy with 3000+ customers and $150M+ ARR (as of summer 2023). I led the product management and design functions and transformed the product team operating model from an "output focus" to a "customer outcome focus", established the 2023 product strategy, and significantly increased cross-functional communication, collaboration and organisational alignment.

People:

• Leadership of 42-person PM & design teams, spread across 5 countries

• Aligned teams on strategic context. Leadership hiring, coaching and development, team career paths, established team behaviour models and hiring practices

• Business case, reorganisation and leadership promotion to establish UX Research team

Product:

• In-depth knowledge of LMS market, industry, and buyer/user needs

• Led the creation and communication of 2023 product strategy utilising customer, industry and product-market-fit research and analysis to identify investment priorities. Cross-functional collaboration to validate the strategy with 'field' teams, exec-alignment (to board level) and company-wide communication

Process:

• Established north star product metrics to measure customer outcomes linked to product strategy

• Established continuous discovery process, including customer co-design methods to validate investments

• Generative research validated bundling & positioning to drive transition to solution selling

• Empowered team to relaunch product enablement process with 75% reduction in inbound requests to PM team

Communication, Strategy & Influence:

• C-level influence communicating, and motivating change ○ Cross-functional collaboration and exec-alignment on 2023 product strategy ○ Stakeholders: CEO, COO, CPO, CSO, CMO, SVP CX ○ Established 'Field Advisory Board' to ritualise monthly information sharing between 'field' and 'product' teams

• Analyst/investor/customer/sales presentations