Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 84
Inspiration from across the world for retail enthusiasts, e-commerce professionals, marketing lovers and technology fans. Welcome back! I summarized some great links again, I stumbled upon this week.
📎Amazon: removing managers; improving customer impact
Too much management always annoyed me, it results in more politics and it prevents getting things done. Management should solve problems, motivate and set structures to get things done. I like to read that this can also be done in large org’s like Amazon. This way they speed up customer facing innovations!
…then stated that role eliminations affect around 200 employees across the country. The spokesperson explained that Amazon is constantly reviewing its team structures to ensure they’re best positioned to swiftly innovate for customers. They mentioned that they’ve adjusted certain parts of their North America Stores team because they believe this new structure will better enable them to fulfill their priorities.
In an email to employees in September 2024, Jassy said that he wants to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers. CEO Jassy wrote in the memo to employees, "So, we’re asking each team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today. If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day.
Or more details:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-ceo-says-cutting-middle-170605849.html
🥷Product Strategy in 2025 full slide deck
This is a great slide deck for all product managers!
It’s the 2025 product strategy playbook. Really a good one and spoiler alert: PM’s only get more valuable!
AI lacks the human context—past experiences, stakeholder iterations—that PMs bring, making strategy more critical than ever.
PMs should use visuals—prototypes, videos, storyboards (e.g., Airbnb’s 2016 Pixar-inspired approach)—to communicate vision effectively and quickly.
The rise of “founder mode” (inspired by Paul Graham), where leaders dive deeper into execution, challenging the idea that PMs only delegate via direct reports.
AI lacks the human context—past experiences, stakeholder iterations—that PMs bring, making strategy more important than ever.
Traditional product strategies set for 2-5 years are obsolete.
https://www.canva.com/design/DAGh8fa_z3s/q2u_EkYcrAH9a-GMN-0j3g/edit
Or with a little more explanation here by the author (thanks for the playbook).
🛫Personalize at scale with Booking.com
I am not the biggest fan of booking.com, at least the past few years not so. In my opinion they were a little of track for a while, not focusing on the customer, but now slowly they get back on track.
I stumbled upon this news article on the partnership between booking and openAI and it is worth a watch. I think they do this right and I assume this is what (partly) will set the standard. See for example, how search and finding is changing on their platform. This can be copied to retail as well. The link below gives additional explanation on the use cases:
Details: https://openai.com/index/booking-com/
🇹🇷 Feature watch: BiTaksi app does it right for travelers
I have to give credits to the PM of BiTaksi. I was in Istanbul the past few days and there you can use BiTaksi as a Taxi app. Nowadays it is more and more common to use an e-sim when traveling, just as I do now (Hello Firsty). Often you do not get a physical (local) number, and if you do get it, you don’t know by heart.
At my Android, as soon as I switch “on” the e-sim, my regular sim switches off and that means I do no longer receive text messages on the normal sim.
Often apps have phone number verification rules and BiTaksi has it also, but they -very conveniently- send the verification to WhatsApp on my NL number (the sim that is offline). That’s very convenient because my WhatsApp keeps on working even without the original SIM.
Now that’s traveler thinking and understanding your user(s), focusing on outcomes! Well done!
🇹🇷 Istanbul: this is also (personalised) retail
Walking back to my hotel from the Galata Tower area in Istanbul after some evening drinks, I noticed a small street transform. What were daytime coffee and souvenir shops now had a surprising late-night addition: a "balloon shooting" store that hadn't been there earlier. -and the only one open at this time- Talk about customized offline retail, catering directly to the post-bar stroll! The irony was perfect, though – the guy running it was fast asleep. 😂
🇷🇴 Romania: annual e-commerce growth rate over 10%
I’ve always said: look at central and Eastern Europe. Things look much brighter there than in Western Europe (Hi E-stonia) and this is also valid for e-commerce. Already for years Romania has high growth in e-commerce growth and acceptance rate and in the past when I traveled there regularly for work, it always amazed me how digital savy everyone was. This data proofs this again:
Online spending in Romania reached 11.7 billion euros last year with 7.7 billion euros spent on products. This was an increase of 10 percent. Growth remains strong and is expected to continue this year.
https://ecommercenews.eu/double-digit-online-growth-in-romania-continues
🔎Bloomberg Interview gives a view inside Google
Bloomberg has a long article that gives some insights in Google.
Some of the strongest reactions are coming not from users but from that other core Google constituency: independent website publishers. Since it became big enough to matter, Google has been in a delicate dance with the people making the sites, videos and articles that its products help surface. The company has consistently—and accurately—described its search as a vital way for websites to attract new users. But it’s also steadily been providing more information on the search page itself, obviating the need for users to click through.
The machine is still humming away, but a chorus of discontent has been building among the web-going public in recent years. Users complain that Google results are increasingly larded with advertising and self-serving features.
Even within the company, criticism was mounting that Google was being guided by the wrong incentives. There’s natural tension between the search unit, which worked to produce the most useful results to users’ queries, and the advertising division, which looked to maximize the revenue those queries produced
Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/j0GoX
Paywalled: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-03-24/google-s-ai-search-overhaul-racing-chatgpt-for-the-web-s-future
🖩The ROI of GenAI -isn’t that what we are all searching for?-
Learn how organizations are measuring and realizing returns on generative AI investments in a report by Google Cloud and Xebia.
Via my dropbox:
🇯🇵 Tokyo latest station development including tech & flying cars
Japan isn’t anymore the higtech society it was in the past. The time of i-mode or even earlier. When I travel in Asia I find China, Singapore, Korea much more advanced in tech, but this one seems very cool and also probably will never come to Europe. A new station in Tokyo that combines robots and flying cars.
There, passengers can use standing, autonomous mobility devices, as security, cleaning and delivery robots whiz around, linked to a database about the entire development.
The company also plans to develop a landing site for "flying cars" (with a cruising distance of 400 km), which are expected to begin commercial operation in 2028, aiming to utilize them for sightseeing in Japan's northeastern Tohoku, central Joshinetsu and other regions.
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20250327/p2a/00m/0bu/029000c
You want to read more on Japan? Checkout this post I wrote a while ago: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/retail-inspiration-japan-alex-baar-clhwf/
✅PPC cheat sheet for your convenience
Cheat sheets can come in handy, like this one for creating PPC ads!
That’s it for today,I hope you liked it, I enjoyed writing it. Thank you for liking and subscribing.
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