In this episode, I speak with Katya Denike, Chief Product Officer at Holland & Barrett, the 150-year-old health and wellness retailer that has become a household name on the UK high street. Having previously worked at McKinsey, Yandex, Ozon, and Beyond 100, she now leads Holland & Barrett's ambitious digital transformation - helping the company evolve from a traditional retailer into a global wellness ecosystem.

We cover a lot, including:

• Transforming a heritage retailer: Holland & Barrett is delivering double-digit growth through a sweeping digital and cultural transformation, investing in everything from supply chain systems to customer-facing apps.
• Global vs local: The company builds strong global digital capabilities (like search and e-commerce infrastructure) while tailoring ~20% of the experience for each market to meet regulatory and customer needs.
• High street resilience: Despite doom-and-gloom headlines, Holland & Barrett is thriving by focusing on product-market fit, preventative healthcare, and efficient tech-enabled operations.
• The app transformation: Taking the mobile app in-house turned it from a struggling third-party product (<5% of digital revenue, 3-star rating) into a core strategic channel (>30% revenue share, 4.5+ rating).
• Internal product management is sexy too: Katya insists that logistics, pricing systems, and data management are some of the most rewarding areas for product managers, enabling everything else to work.
• Team structure: Around 100 people in product, design, and research, split between "firm foundations" (core systems) and "omnichannel customer experience", plus a small but mighty product ops team.
• Leadership leap: Moving into her first CPO role was daunting, but support from her manager pushed her to take the leap and build a truly independent product function inside the company.
• Skills for success: Katya highlights high agency, emotional intelligence, and the ability to navigate crucial conversations as must-haves for product leaders.

Check out Holland & Barrett's website: https://www.hollandandbarrett.com/, or their careers page: https://apply.hollandandbarrettjobs.com/jobs/vacancy/find/results/.

You can connect with Katya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denikekatya/.

You can also check out Katya's podcast, Rocking Cribs & Careers. here! https://open.spotify.com/show/3rheb2Q1YuUvdmeYS8ngqA.

In this episode, I speak with Jamie Mercer, Chief Product Officer at Trusted Housesitters, the global pet care and travel marketplace disrupting two industries at once. Jamie has previously held senior product roles at VoucherCodes, Skyscanner, Student Beans and IVC Evidensia, and now leads product at a scale-up known for putting trust at the heart of its community-driven business.

We cover a lot, including:

• TrustedHousesitters' unique proposition - a two-sided marketplace mixing travel and pet sitting, where both pet owners and sitters pay a subscription to help create mutual trust and respect.
• Scaling through word of mouth - 70-75% of members join via a friend, and how the team are working to amplify that growth while keeping trust at the centre.
• Balancing marketplace dynamics - keeping supply and demand in sync, supporting new sitters with no ratings, and using AI and personalisation to build confidence.
• Using AI responsibly - from accelerating customer insight analysis to improving customer support, AI speeds up decision-making but always in service of company strategy.
• Building empowered product teams - why Jamie invested early in product ops and product marketing instead of hierarchy, and how she's now preparing to scale with Product Directors.
• Commercial product management - the importance of PMs with business acumen who can link solving customer problems with driving commercial outcomes.
• Executive alignment as the hardest (and most valuable) job - why alignment across the C-suite is the best air cover a leader can provide for their teams.
• Lessons from leadership - why some of the hardest decisions are killing months of work, the surprise of soft skills dominating the CPO role, and why leadership still matters in the AI era.

Check out Trusted Housesitters' website: https://trustedhousesitters.com/, or their careers page: https://www.trustedhousesitters.com/careers/.

You can connect with Jamie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiemercer/.

In this episode, I speak with Shiri Mosenzon Erez, Chief Product Officer at commercetools, a global leader in enterprise composable commerce that supports thousands of retailers in hundreds of countries, enabling tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually. Shiri's career journey has taken her from consulting into her first product role at Tesco, through product leadership at Ocado, and now leading at a scale-up with a global enterprise footprint.

We cover a lot, including:

• What commercetools does: An API-first, composable commerce engine powering online trade for major global enterprises and manufacturers, enabling flexibility, resilience, and constant uptime for B2C and B2B commerce.
• Composable commerce explained: Allowing customers to mix and match best-of-breed components across the commerce value stream or opting for "pre-composed" solutions built on the same composable foundation.
• Strategic focus in a flexible platform: How the team decides where to build, buy, or partner, using value stream mapping to prioritise and avoid being pulled in too many directions.
• AI and agents in commerce: From data tagging to conversational assistants and dynamic pricing, Shiri shares early enterprise adoption patterns and the role of commercetools' MCP layer in letting customers plug in the agents they trust.
• Product team structure: A 55-person product org spanning UX, product management, and close engineering partnerships, with domain-focused teams and a strong CPO–CTO pairing model.
• Balancing explore vs exploit: Encouraging teams to pivot to higher-value domains when propositions mature, and celebrating decisions to stop work that’s no longer impactful.
• Customer-led vs strategy-led delivery: Using proactive roadmap communication to align big customer requests with company strategy and KPIs, turning reactive asks into collaborative problem-solving.
• Technical and business balance in PMs: Moving from a largely technical PM base toward a mix of skills, with growing focus on business value and direct engagement with business stakeholders.
• Leadership approach: Shiri's focus on connecting product strategy to company strategy, advocating at the executive level, and ensuring her teams feel purpose, autonomy, and mastery in their work.

Check out commercetools's website: https://commercetools.com/, or their careers page: https://commercetools.com/careers/jobs.

You can connect with Shiri on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shiri-mosenzon/.