Engagement Overview
Engaged to provide product and delivery leadership for a fast-growing start-up as it prepared to scale its platform and target IPO. The organisation required clear ownership of its product strategy and delivery approach to support rapid growth, mature its platform capabilities, and onboard new clients at pace.
The engagement focused on stabilising delivery, scaling the proprietary platform, and enabling client onboarding across both existing e-commerce sites and new platform consumers.
Platform as a Service
Problem
The organisation had developed a proprietary e-commerce platform, including warehouse management and order fulfilment capabilities, which supported its own sites but was not designed to scale as a commercial Platform-as-a-Service offering. As the business sought to onboard external clients and create a new revenue stream, it lacked the product ownership, delivery structure, and operational processes required to manage client onboarding, requirements, and delivery at scale, creating delivery risk and constraining growth.
Outcome
Enabled the platform’s commercialisation as a Platform-as-a-Service offering, onboarding six external clients ranging from partial platform adoption to full end-to-end implementations. This included site setup, warehouse management integration, fulfilment workflows, and support for marketing and sales enablement, positioning IFG as a specialist e-commerce platform provider within the market.
Reduced client onboarding time from three months to two weeks through automation, process refinement, and structured documentation. This materially increased onboarding capacity from four to 24 clients per year, removing a key constraint to scale and supporting predictable revenue growth.
Delivered a third-party warehouse management integration at scale, enabling external platforms such as Shopify and Magento to integrate directly with the WMS. This provided near real-time synchronisation across order lifecycle stages, including pick, pack, dispatch, and returns, and directly underpinned a multi-million-pound commercial agreement with a key client.
Full Stack Platform
Problem
Despite operating an established warehouse management system supporting over 30 owned sites, the organisation faced multiple concurrent initiatives competing for attention, each with tight delivery deadlines and limited prioritisation. I was engaged to introduce clarity and direction to the product roadmap and to deliver a coordinated set of front-end and back-end initiatives, spanning cart optimisation, new site development, and platform integrations, ensuring progress aligned with commercial priorities and delivery was executed predictably.
Outcome
Enabled accurate US sales tax handling by integrating the platform with Avalara, removing reliance on a default 7% sales tax rate and ensuring compliance while preventing unnecessary overcharging.
Stabilised and standardised analytics across the platform by delivering a full Google Analytics 4 migration for all sites, resolving issues in the existing setup that were causing inaccurate sales and performance reporting and restoring confidence in decision-making data.
Delivered three in-house e-commerce sites end-to-end, covering user experience definition, SEO configuration, Google Tag Manager implementation, and warehouse management system integration, enabling faster go-to-market for new propositions.
Embedded a data-driven optimisation approach by introducing A/B testing as a standard practice, improving the ability to optimise user journeys based on measurable behaviour rather than assumption.