A collegiate bookstore business with strong physical operations and no digital presence, in a market that was about to be reshaped by both e-commerce and mobile at the same time.
The request was
“Build us a website to sell books online.”
Discovery showed
A storefront alone would have competed on price against larger players and lost. The defensible position was owning the on-campus workflow, the part larger competitors could not reach.
That reframing moved the work from web project to platform strategy, and eventually from a single campus to a multi-campus enterprise offering.
- Studied the actual on-campus buying process rather than the assumed one.
- Identified where mobile could remove friction that competitors were structurally unable to touch.
- Tested enterprise appetite with institutions before generalizing the product.
Exhibit
From Storefront to Enterprise Platform
- 01
Storefront
E-commerce launch, $1M in year one
- 02
Mobile presence
First-mover mobile strategy in the collegiate market
- 03
On-campus workflow
Owning the process larger competitors could not reach
- 04
Enterprise solution
Generalized into a multi-campus offering
- 01An e-commerce platform generating $1M in first-year revenue.
- 02A mobile presence that established market leadership in the collegiate bookstore category.
- 03A multi-campus enterprise solution built from a single-market foundation.
- 04Product teams built and developed from scratch, with a deliberate focus on growing talent.
- Product leadership
- Director of Product; owned strategy and delivery.
- Market entry
- Initiated and led the expansion into collegiate mobile.
- Team building
- Built and coached the product organization.
- $1M in first-year e-commerce revenue.
- Industry recognition for the mobile strategy in the collegiate market.
- A single-market product turned into a multi-campus enterprise platform.
This is where I learned that the stated request is a symptom. Ten years later the pattern is the same at every scale: the request is X, discovery shows the problem is Y, and the entire value of the role is being willing to say so.