Zalando

The challenge

Zalando's Partner Program gives thousands of brands and retailers direct access to one of Europe's largest fashion marketplaces. The zDirect portal is where they run that business: articles, orders, marketing, fulfilment and returns.

Every team had a view on what to fix or build next, but none could point to evidence of what partners were actually trying to achieve. Without that, prioritisation came down to opinion.

What I led

I reset the work around one question: what are partners trying to get done, whatever the portal offers today? Using Jobs to be Done and Opportunity Gap Analysis, I rebuilt the jobs list from scratch.

To make the result shared rather than imposed, I ran eight workshops with product and design teams, then five with partners: twelve people from five partner organisations. Together they produced 43 validated jobs.

A partner survey then scored each job for importance and satisfaction. It was linked to commercial partner data, so the results reflected the partners that mattered most to the business. The priorities were the jobs that scored high on importance and low on satisfaction.

The outcome

• Product, design and commercial teams gained a common, evidence-based way to prioritise.
• The Commercial Team Lead adopted it as the formal partner voice in product development.
• It became the basis for UX benchmarking and the insight roadmap, with a repeat study planned to track progress.

I also flagged two gaps to close next: field observation, to catch needs partners don't put into words, and a partner panel, to make recruiting partners faster and more commercially relevant.

Where this fits

The same approach sits behind the AI Opportunity Sprint: establish what matters most to the people involved, then prioritise against it.