Architecting B2C from Within a B2B Organization.

How a legacy scholastic brand crossed into mobile-first consumer eCommerce — and rebuilt its operating model along the way.

CLIENT

Balfor & Co.

YEAR

2017-2018

ROLE

Manager of UX → Product Manager

Balfour had built decades of B2B success — selling scholastic wear, spirit gear, and commencement products through institutional channels. The B2C opportunity was real, but the organization wasn't built for it. Launching a consumer eCommerce site against this backdrop wasn't a feature-delivery problem. It was an organizational design problem dressed up as an eCommerce project.

Recognizing the real problem

Marketing operated separately from product. Copywriters wrote for product assortment, not SEO or accessibility. Mobile was an afterthought. Sprint ceremonies didn't include the people who owned the customer relationship. None of this was visible in the initial brief, which described a website launch. All of it was visible in the first two weeks.

I made the explicit decision to expand the scope of the role beyond user experience into product management — because the gaps were in the operating model, not the UI. The pitch to leadership was that the platform would only succeed if marketing, design, and development became one product team for the duration of the launch.

The role shift was the precondition for the outcome.

Mobile-first as a forcing function

The second strategic decision was to commit fully to mobile-first. Balfour's previous digital presence had been desktop-led and informational. Going mobile-first was both a market-aligned bet and a forcing function — it required new disciplines (responsive component governance, mobile SME involvement in architecture, mobile-aware copywriting) that pulled the org into the integrated practice it needed anyway.

I instituted 1:1 architecture meetings with mobile SMEs in development. Hired a dedicated mobile designer to embed mobile-first thinking from the design side. Established regular review sessions with the development scrum leader that operated outside the formal ceremonies — a working layer of cross-team collaboration that hadn't existed before. On the platform side, we ran SiteCore for CMS, Magento for eCommerce, and built a CDN to manage shared brand assets across both.

What the launch unlocked

Mobile conversion came in at roughly 6% — nearly double the 3.5% target, and well above the ~3% industry average. Mobile traffic increased 32% from the previous information-only experience. Online sales grew 20%, and marketing ROI improved 15% through product hierarchy optimization and disciplined A/B testing.

6%

Mobile conversion — nearly 2x the 3.5% target

32%

Increase in mobile traffic

20%

Online sales growth

15%

Marketing ROI improvement

Closing Note

This project was the work that taught me to recognize when a product problem is actually an organizational problem — and to price that into the plan. The launch metrics matter, but the more durable outcome is that Balfour came out of the project with a different operating model. That's the multiplier in this kind of work: ship the product, leave the org better at shipping the next one.