Case Study · 01
Closing the operational gaps that turn confirmed sales into cancellations
A meaningful share of confirmed sales never became active customers. I led a structured programme to separate the gaps product could fix from the ones it could not, size them, and build a sequenced plan leadership could fund.
The problem
Between a customer confirming a sale and that sale becoming an active service, a share of orders were cancelled. Each one meant lost revenue, wasted sales effort and a worse experience for the customer. The rate had become accepted as a cost of doing business, and nobody owned it end to end.
The framing that mattered: treating cancellations as a single “sales problem” hid the fact that they came from very different causes, owned by different teams.
My approach
- Defined the metric. Agreed a single measure (cancellations as a share of gross sales) so every team was looking at the same number.
- Separated causes by owner. Split cancellation reasons into gaps product could solve (data captured incorrectly, missing validation, unclear steps in the journey), operational process gaps, and external factors outside our control.
- Sized and sequenced. T-shirt sized every product-solvable item and set a pick order by impact against effort, so the team started with the fixes that recovered the most sales soonest.
- Built the business case. Produced an impact estimate for senior leadership, linking each fix to its expected effect on the cancellation rate, which turned a vague concern into a funded plan with a full-year target.
Outcome so far
The programme is in delivery. [add results as they land, e.g. which fixes shipped and the measured change]
What I learned
The highest-leverage step was not a feature. It was agreeing the definition and the ownership split, because it stopped teams arguing about whose problem it was and let each one act on its own share.