Keep the digital investment connected to its purpose

I want a board's digital investment discussion to remain connected to the commercial decision the software is meant to support. A feature can be delivered successfully while its intended meaning remains disputed. An experiment can produce an attractive result while the measurement path prevents a sound interpretation. An architecture can give a team useful freedom while retaining obligations that the investment paper barely mentions. These are different issues, but each affects what management can responsibly tell directors about the value and readiness of a proposed change.

My contribution at Solmerive is as an executive presenting those matters, not as a member of its board. I explain the product question, the engineering work and the consequences of the available choices. Commercial policy remains with its authorised owner, while our CIO has a separate enterprise systems remit. I want directors to understand those responsibilities because ambiguity between functions can disappear inside a broad label such as digital transformation. A useful paper should make clear whose decision is still required and what evidence management has used to support the recommendation.

The promotion review illustrates the point in an accessible way. A €120 eligible basket produced €90 or €88 under two orders of the same reductions. The software could implement either sequence, but the retailer first needed an approved offer and customer explanation. Eighteen disagreements in our authored examples led to a four-week deferral. A board would not need to prescribe the calculation. It could ask whether management had resolved the commercial interpretation, understood the cost of waiting and provided a consistent account of the decision across the functions responsible for it.

The experiment case raises a question about the quality of evidence supplied to executives. A recorded allocation that differed from the planned split prompted investigation, which found differential event loss. The attractive click result could not support the feature decision as presented. I backed the repair and preparation of a fresh trial without claiming that the earlier missing observations had been recovered. Directors should be able to ask whether the organisation can identify and report such limitations before they become confident value claims. That includes the resources and incentives needed for teams to say when an interpretation is not yet supported.

The mobile-basket programme requires a different account of progress. Fourteen proposed interface changes could move without the full website release train, while four needed coordinated backend work. Keeping both numbers visible helps explain the investment's actual scope. I would want directors to understand the continuing shared responsibility and its cost, rather than infer that a new architecture had removed every dependency. The board can examine whether those obligations fit the strategy and are adequately supported without becoming a second software-design authority. Management remains accountable for the design and its implementation.

I would bring the same attention to public claims about customer experience. A curated search review is not a website-wide sales experiment. Correcting a selected product-image set does not establish complete accessibility compliance. A technical result can still be useful when its scope is stated accurately. The board's discussion should help management distinguish what has been demonstrated, what remains an assumption and what further work is needed before a wider claim is made. That discipline can improve the investment decision as well as the language used to communicate it.

For a future external seat, I would expect to learn the company's wider economics and governance responsibilities before assuming that my product experience answers its principal questions. I currently hold no directorship and make no committee-chair claim. The proposed twenty annual days would require employer consent, relationship review and a calendar that includes preparation and exceptional demands. I would want to contribute to collective oversight with a clear product perspective, listen to colleagues whose expertise differs from mine and respect the distinction between an informed challenge and an instruction to management about how to run its engineering team.