Standing Up a Product COE to Reduce Marketing Waste
A high-volume marketing team at a prominent sportswear retailer was grappling with severe operational inefficiencies: alarming product loss, devastating launch leaks, significant surplus spending, chronic space shortages, and substantial material waste in the critical process of managing pre-launch samples destined for photoshoots, executive internal review meetings, and high-profile events.
The Opportunity
We identified a mission-critical opportunity to achieve radical optimization across processes, storage, security, scalability, and sustainability practices. The solution was the design and implementation of a rigorously defined Marketing Product Management Center of Excellence (COE).
What We Delivered
Aiming to uncover high-impact, meaningful ways to elevate marketing product management and galvanize a fragmented team around shared, strategic solutions, we executed the following:
Conducted Pain Point Interviews: We performed in-depth interviews with individuals currently executing the product management function to gain a precise understanding of their responsibilities, critical workflows, and most acute operational pain points.
Defined a Centralized COE Model: We designed a robust COE model, complete with formalized job descriptions and leveling, specifically to centralize and strategically elevate the crucial operational role of product management.
Audited Physical Storage Infrastructure: We conducted comprehensive tours of all current product storage locations to critically assess space constraints, security vulnerabilities, and access control policies.
Benchmarked Best-in-Class Solutions: We toured best-in-class operational models—including e-commerce warehouses, flagship retail stores, and photo labs—to define the optimal process, space, and technology requirements for establishing a state-of-the-art onsite Marketing Product Library.
Facilitated Challenge Identification Workshops: We led focused workshops to collaboratively identify and prioritize the top systemic challenges faced by product operations talent when managing high-value pre-launch product.
Mapped End-to-End Processes: We meticulously mapped both the current-state and ideal future-state processes—from the initial product request through to product fulfillment and final liquidation.
Defined Cost-Saving Solutions: We engineered solutions aimed at dramatically reducing overspend, mitigating product loss, and minimizing waste, leveraging advanced tools for greater alignment, visibility, and organization within the product library.
Identified Sustainable Liquidation Channels: We pinpointed innovative, sustainable solutions for product liquidation, including high-value employee sample sales, recycling materials into shopping bags, and shredding components for alternative uses, such as rubber running tracks.
Designed the Executive Business Case: We crafted a polished, comprehensive recommendation report and booklet to build a powerful, data-driven business case for the executive leadership team to fund the Product Management COE.
What Made a Statement
By leveraging our core services in strategy, operations, and change management, we identified a significant, quantifiable amount of cost and space savings that were more than sufficient to self-fund the entire COE. This new center not only drove operational excellence but also formally recognized and elevated the crucial roles of the operations talent managing the marketing product lifecycle. It was heralded as a strategic win for both executive leaders and the on-the-ground teams.
