Mobile App for a Major Canadian Retailer — Loyalty Program Focus

A major Canadian retail enterprise · Mobile Product Owner (Contract)

Context: A major Canadian retailer was evolving its mobile app, with a strong focus on the loyalty program experience — how members earn and redeem rewards, manage their accounts, discover offers, and engage with the retailer across in-store and digital touchpoints. The team needed an experienced product owner to come in on contract, take ownership of a specific area of the app, and deliver measurable improvements in delivery quality and member-facing feature readiness.

The Challenge: The team had strong engineering capacity but was struggling with sprint predictability and post-release defects, and the positioning of new features for members and internal stakeholders was inconsistent. The contract was scoped tightly: the work needed to ship, and it needed to ship well, in a defined window.

My Approach: Tightened the discovery-to-delivery loop. Validated problems with internal stakeholders and reviewed member feedback signals early, translated insights into clear requirements and user stories, and made sure each sprint had a defined success criterion before work started.

Drove delivery discipline. Worked with engineering leads on capacity planning, sprint scoping, and definition-of-done criteria — making sprint commitments more realistic and follow-through more consistent.

Improved release quality. Introduced more rigorous pre-release validation and post-release tracking, and used the data to prioritize quality work alongside feature work.

Improved internal positioning of features. Created clear product documentation and enablement content so internal teams understood what was shipping, why it mattered to members, and how to support it.

Outcome: Improved on-time delivery by approximately 15%.

Improved sprint predictability by roughly 20–25%.

Reduced release defects by approximately 20–25%.

Delivered the contracted scope on schedule with stakeholder sign-off.

Skills Demonstrated: Embedded product ownership in a contract context · Mobile app product management · Loyalty program features · Retail and consumer product experience · Sprint planning and delivery discipline · Quality and release management