Retail Product Management in a Global Pandemic (with Rhiana Matthew, Senior PM @ Publicis Sapient)

An interview with Rhiana Matthew. Rhiana is a Senior Product Manager at Publicis Sapient, a product consultancy that aims to help other companies build products better and set their teams up for success. She works in omnichannel retail product management, and saw her product strategy crumble to dust in the "new normal" of COVID-19.

We talk about a lot, including:

• Her work with Publicis Sapient, what they do and how she looks to enable companies to get better at product management
• Some of the things she's working on at the moment, what omnichannel retail solutions are, and what she's selling
• How she got into product management and what gave her the spark, and how making an impact on real customers ticked all her boxes
• The pros and cons of working for a consultancy and being "In and out" vs working directly for a product company
• How the news of lockdown impacted her team and whether they took it in their stride or panicked
• The approaches the product team took to work out where to play and get 120+ ideas down to 11
• The spectre of timeline-based, hard deadline deliverables and whether it's possible to get away from this in retail
• How operating under wartime conditions opened her eyes to the art of the possible, and how she thinks this will impact her approach in the future
• Her passion for supporting mental health and some of the ways she learned to cope through the chaos
• Her passion for using tech for good, and some of the ways she tries to contribute to making the world a better place

And much more!

The podcast is on Product Hunt!

This episode release coincides with the podcast hitting Product Hunt, the leading community where people rate new products and ideas. Would appreciate your support and feedback!

If you want more from Publicis Sapient

I spoke to Rhiana's colleague Jack Stevens a few months back. Jack spoke frankly of some of the mental health challenges of working under lockdown.

Contact Rhiana

If you want to catch up with Rhiana, you can reach her on LinkedIn or Rhiana's Medium page