Craft.io helps retail giant Kingfisher speed its journey to adopting a product mindset

The international home improvement retailer leverages Craft.io to create product management efficiencies, connect work to strategic objectives, and make better-informed decisions.

Craft.io makes it so easy to tie everything we do to OKRs and other metrics that it’s proving to be one of the most valuable tools in Kingfisher’s move to a product-led culture.

Matt Jackson, Group Product Manager

The Company

Making home improvement easier for millions of people.

Whether they need appliances and materials for a full kitchen remodel, tools for a plumbing project, or a few plants for their garden, millions of European residents every year find their home improvement products at one of the various retail chains owned by Kingfisher plc.

The international company behind some of Europe’s most successful retail banners, Kingfisher operates in over 1,900 stores in eight countries across Europe under retail banners including B&Q, Castorama, Brico Dépôt, Screwfix, TradePoint and Koçtaş, supported by over 82,000 colleagues.

The Challenges

Scattered product data (in Excel, Jira, etc.) led to wasted development resources due to inconsistencies, duplicative work, and lack of visibility across teams.

Matt Jackson, Group Product Manager for Kingfisher, explains that the company’s product teams were managing their product content using many different applications: Excel, Jira, Confluence, PowerPoint, Miro, and others. As Matt explains, working this way was highly inefficient.

“Teams were managing and sharing their work using all sorts of tools. That meant every team’s reports were different and inconsistent. And because these tools often didn’t connect to each other, product managers and product owners often needed to take content from one app and manually re-enter it somewhere else to share it with stakeholders.”

But even more concerning than the inefficiencies and wasted time, Matt says, was the ongoing risk of miscommunication and misalignment.

“Say our B&Q retail stores needed a new app built, and the work was going to touch 10 teams. If those teams weren’t managing their data the same way and we couldn’t view it all in one place, it would be very difficult to properly sequence the work, identify blockers before it was too late, and keep our senior leadership updated.”

The Solution

Craft.io helps centralize data and create massive efficiencies.

Matt conducted an intensive search for the right product management platform — which included internal surveys to learn what functionality Kingfisher’s product teams deemed most important, as well as demos and proofs-of-concept with several solutions. On all the key metrics — features, flexibility, ease of use, integrations, and in particular Craft.io’s built-in Guru Layer — Matt says that “Craft.io won by a country mile.”

“Craft.io really nailed our top requirements — particularly the ability to easily create and share roadmaps, using whichever views and details the situation called for, and the ability to enable bidirectional data syncing between our product management platform and our other apps like Jira and Figma.”

But as important as those capabilities were to Kingfisher, and as effective as they’re proving to be now that the company’s product teams are using them, Matt notes that Kingfisher’s product domains will continually utilize and generate even more value thanks to Craft.io’s unique Guru Layer.

 

Where Craft.io really stands out for me is the Guru Layer – all of those great templates for roadmapping, planning, prioritization, all of it. There just isn’t anything like that layer of built-in best practices with any other product management software, and Kingfishers’ product domains are starting to get enormous value from using them.

Matt Jackson, Group Product Manager

The Results

Saving expensive developers’ time, keeping everyone aligned, and working on what matters.

When Matt began rolling out Craft.io to a few product teams, he found the improved workflows and new efficiencies so compelling that he has created several processes to get the word out across Kingfisher’s product organization and help product teams get the most value from the platform.

Matt built a Craft.io Guild, for example, where he will gather feedback from colleagues to define best practices for using Craft.io and help onboard other product teams. He also built a library of resources, such as links to key Craft.io integrations, in Kingfisher’s Confluence environment. Working in partnership with Craft.io’s Customer Success Manager, Matt built the initial training program for product teams to onboard them and to quickly gain expertise in using Craft.io.

Evangelizing Craft.io is a strategically valuable use of his time, Matt explains, because he has already seen the platform significantly improve the workflows of Kingfisher’s product teams in many ways.

Saving time

One of the most immediate benefits Matt saw after starting to use Craft.io was that it helped cut down on the tedious, manual tasks he and his product teams have had to perform repeatedly in their everyday workflows.

“Every time I’m able to switch to a particular roadmap Guru view in seconds to show stakeholders the details they care about, I know I’m saving hours over what that process used to require in PowerPoint. And that’s just my work. Multiply that by dozens of product managers across the company, doing this over and over, and we’re talking about massive time savings.”

In addition to saving time for product managers, Matt points out that Craft.io is also starting to help streamline the work of the company’s development teams — which also means an enormous time and cost savings. “Because our product and development teams now have the opportunity to collaborate and sync their progress through a shared platform, we’re saving our developers from wasting time working on outdated tasks or one team duplicating work another might have already completed. The tighter planning and progress monitoring is starting to generate real ROI for Kingfisher.”

Improving insights

Another benefit of Craft.io, Matt explains, is that because product teams across the company are now building and sharing their content using a central platform with consistent data hierarchies, it’s easier than ever for senior leaders and other stakeholders to see the big picture — which they do using Craft.io’s product portfolio management.

“Craft.io is so flexible that we easily mapped our existing hierarchy onto the platform. That means any product leader can instantly grasp the scope of an initiative, or our progress on multiple initiatives across the company at a given time, because we’re all using a consistent data hierarchy.”

Staying strategic

Finally, Matt points out, centralizing Kingfisher’s product management work in Craft.io is helping the company ensure all teams are prioritizing initiatives that create real value for customers — which represents a major step on the company’s path to becoming product led.

“With Craft.io, we can now connect every item in our backlogs, strategies, and roadmaps to a specific OKR or other type of strategic goal. This is helping our product organization focus on adding value for our customers instead of just completing work because it was on a list. I’m confident that being able to continuously check our priorities against their potential end user value will help Kingfisher deliver even better solutions for our customers.”

Kingfisher is a massive organization with multiple product teams. Doing our work in so many different applications made it nearly impossible to identify dependencies, measure scope and progress, and make the bestpossible decisions. Craft.io solves all of this

Matt Jackson, Group Product Manager

Kingfisher’s favorite Craft.io features

Guru views Product roadmapping Portfolio management
To apply best practice prioritization. To quickly build and share roadmaps. To spot dependencies and view progress companywide.