At the Retail Technology Show, Fabrice Khullar, Director of Product, UX and CVR Optimisation at Boots, didn’t spend much time talking about technology in the way the room might have expected.
His session was framed around how digital product is evolving inside a business of Boots’ scale. But the focus wasn’t platforms, tools or architecture. It was customer experience, and more specifically, how little of it most organisations genuinely understand before they start building – always a risky move.
Khullar’s starting point was that retail is still operating with an outdated view of the customer journey. The idea of a neat, linear path from discovery to purchase doesn’t hold anymore. Customers move across channels constantly, often making decisions before they ever reach a retailer’s own environment.
He described a typical purchase journey as fragmented and external. Someone might search on Google, watch a video, scroll social, ask friends, walk into a store, leave, and only later convert. One purchase, but spread across multiple touchpoints, many of which the retailer doesn’t control.
That shift matters because it changes where influence sits. By the time a customer lands on a website or app, the role of that experience is often confirmation rather than persuasion.
From there, the argument moved inside the organisation. Khullar was clear that most retail businesses still approach product development backwards. Initiatives start with internal demand, long lists of features and roadmaps built around stakeholder priorities. What’s missing in this approach is a clear articulation of the customer problem those features are supposed to solve.
He gave a simple example. A trading team produces dozens of requirements ahead of peak. Product and tech teams respond by working out what can be delivered. Nobody stops to ask which of those requests actually matter, or whether they solve the right problem at all.
The result is activity without clarity, which is ultimately a waste of time and money. For Khullar, this is where product, UX and optimisation should be doing more heavy lifting. Not just delivering solutions, but shaping whether those solutions should exist in the first place. Being the people who stop to ask ‘why?’ That means getting involved earlier, before budgets are committed and before roadmaps are locked. Broad conversations with everyone involved.
Experimentation plays a central role in that shift, but not in the way retail often uses it. Rather than treating testing as a post-launch optimisation tool, Khullar framed it as a way to validate assumptions upfront. Testing whether a problem is real before investing in a solution, rather than once the horse has bolted.
At Boots, that has meant using experimentation to challenge core journeys such as login, registration and loyalty. Not because they were assumed to be broken, but to understand what was actually getting in the way for customers before making changes. Things shouldn’t have to go wrong before they can be tested.
It’s a subtle change in approach, but one that reframes risk. Moving from building what the business believes is the answer, to testing what the problem actually is.
The barrier, as he acknowledged, is structural. Retail organisations are built around certainty. Budgets are tied to forecasts. Delivery is measured against predefined outcomes. There’s limited room to say an idea didn’t hold up under scrutiny and needs to change direction.
That makes it harder to embed a test-and-learn culture in any meaningful way. Khullar also pushed back on the industry’s long-standing obsession with becoming “tech companies”. In practice, he argued, that mindset has led to expensive transformation programmes that assume the business already knows what it needs to build.
By the time those programmes are delivered, customer behaviour has often moved on. The alternative isn’t to stop investing in technology, but to invest in a way that keeps options open. To build in flexibility by validating decisions earlier, rather than committing to them at scale.
There was also a more pragmatic point running through the session. Retail already has the data most other industries would want. Transaction data, footfall, returns, behavioural signals across channels.
The issue isn’t access to insight – there’s plenty of that. It’s whether that insight is being used at the right moment in the decision-making process. Khullar’s closing argument was less about tools and more about teams. The businesses that adapt fastest will be the ones that bring commercial, operational and product expertise together earlier. Before solutions are defined. Before investment is locked in.
Because when those perspectives are aligned at the problem stage, rather than the delivery stage, the chances of building something that actually works improve significantly.
It’s not a new idea, but in a sector still heavily driven by internal priorities and legacy structures, it remains a difficult one to execute. And that, more than any specific technology choice, is where the real challenge sits.
