The Goal

To replace our legacy merchandising platform (Fredhopper) with Bloomreach Discovery before contract expiry, without disrupting core user journeys. This meant launching a new product and stock feed integration, replicating complex logic across all global locales, and unlocking AI-powered merchandising capabilities to drive performance.

The Challenge:

P1 priority with a hard 2-month deadline - no contract extension possible. Simultaneously delivered TikTok Shop feed refactor and Intelligent Reach API integration while coordinating developers across multiple critical workstreams.

My Role

As Product Owner, I led the discovery, delivery, UAT, and hypercare of the Bloomreach rollout while managing 4 concurrent technical projects: Bloomreach migration, TikTok Shop integration, IR API delivery, and Product Service refactor. I owned backlog definition, wrote BLRs with developers, managed comms across 7+ stakeholder teams, and delivered under intense P1 timelines with daily resource allocation across competing priorities.

Discovery & Strategy

• Defined end-to-end product feed requirements, partnering with developers to write scalable logic and 18+ custom attributes supporting filtering, boosting, and sorting.

• Negotiated critical scope trade-offs between Merchandising and eCommerce to balance launch velocity with system stability.

• Enabled regional personalisation by supporting feed setup across UK, FR, US, CA, IE, AU, and MENA stores.

• Coordinated cross-project dependencies, aligned Product Service refactor timeline with Bloomreach feed requirements while maintaining TikTok Shop delivery.

UAT & Quality Assurance

• Led the Bloomreach UAT process: creating test plans, aligning QA and merch teams, validating data flows across PIM product data and feeds.

• Delivered high-confidence testing coverage across PLP filters, ranking logic, out-of-stock fallback, and visual merchandising behaviour.

• Managed critical deployment failures - when feed deployment failed, immediately coordinated redeploy and raised CICD fix tickets to prevent future pipeline issues.

• Provided real-time diagnostic tracking with timestamped logs (SKU updates from PIM → DB → Bloomreach) to identify 40+ minute latency bottlenecks and set realistic business expectations.

Launch & Hypercare

• Conducted end-to-end feed validation and drove go-live readiness with Bloomreach's onboarding team.

• Led hypercare post-launch: identifying edge cases, triaging live issues (e.g. caching delays, facet mismatches), and coordinating fixes with engineering in real time.

• Crisis management across multiple projects - maintained Bloomreach stability while resolving TikTok overselling issues and IR API feed failures through parallel developer coordination.

• Delivered 18+ new features while maintaining service stability during launch.

The Outcome

Performance Gains

• +6.9% Gross Sales and +11.2% Unit Sales uplift across all channels.

• +6.2% Orders achieved despite –7.6% site traffic drop: proving significant conversion efficiency gains.

AI Testing & Optimisation

• +4% RPV uplift in the US and +8% in Ireland on category PLPs vs. default merchandising.

• Peak tests achieved +29.1% RPV uplift using Bloomreach AI vs. manual pinning.

• +14% uplift through algorithmic boosts (Newness, Back in Stock, Conversion signals).

Strategic Wins

• Met P1 hard deadline with 2-month delivery window across 4 major technical projects.

• AI ranking outperformed manual merchandising in 7 of 8 tests.

• Enabled rollout of self-learning merchandising across 7 international markets.

• Zero customer impact during migration despite concurrent TikTok Shop and IR API launches.

• Established the foundation for enterprise-scale, data-driven visual merchandising.