01/Case
What the reward budget returns
Your ad asks for commercial acumen alongside loyalty value, adoption, engagement and NPS. Those are the questions a client raises once a programme is live and the business case has gone quiet.
A client says: we have plenty of members and nobody can tell us what the points are buying.
Lulu Retail, headquartered in Abu Dhabi and listed on ADX, published these in its FY2025 results on 13 February 2026. The first two measure identification, not behaviour. The third sets the scale the reward budget has to justify.
The reward budget, mechanic by mechanic
Worked example. Illustrative figures except where marked published.
Two thirds of $7.9bn puts roughly $5.3bn of sales on cards. At an earn rate of 0.9% of member spend that is about $47.5m of rewards a year, or a quarter of the published net profit. Below it is split three ways, each net of the margin it brings in at a 22% gross margin.
Net contribution per mechanic, millions of dollars a year. Left of the line loses money, right of it makes money.
Base earn, every basketspend $28.5m · margin $9.4m
−19.1
Category boosts, own brandspend $11.9m · margin $21.3m
+9.4
Lapsed win-back offersspend $7.1m · margin $18.4m
+11.3
Platform, CRM and opsfixed, runs either way
−6.2
With base earn unfunded
+$14.5m a year of contribution, against −$4.6m as the programme runs today
/Halve the earn rate, do not remove it
Half the budget pays for baskets that were already coming, and that is where the $14.5m sits. A rate of zero tells 8.4 million members the programme has been cancelled, so I would halve it instead. Move the freed budget to boosts and win-back, and hold a random group of members at the old rate so the effect can be measured.
The app rebuild is the first thing I would refuse
It is the most sellable opening project and the wrong one. Nothing in the ledger is negative because of the interface. It is negative because of the earn rate and because no holdout exists. The app work comes once there is a number worth designing around.
What I would ship first
Halve base earn behind a holdout. 90% of members move to the lower rate and 10% keep the current one. Assignment stays stable per member, the app shows a single points balance, and the change is reversible in one release. I would read margin per active member at week eight. If the treated group is not at least flat, the rate goes back.
Use a lapse-risk model to target win-back offers. I would use transaction history to identify members at risk of lapsing and set the offer each one receives. I would not add a chatbot to the app. Sia became an OpenAI Advanced Partner on 23 July 2026, so the modelling capability is already in the firm.
Sign members up at the store openings. Fifty GCC stores are planned for 2026 to 2028. Opening week is the cheapest moment a grocer gets to enrol members, and it happens at the till, where Sia's Deep Review work already sits. I would track enrolments per opening and their 90 day retained rate, owned by product rather than the store.
This model uses public data. I have assumed the earn rate, the 22% gross margin and the three way split of the budget; breakage, redemption mix and margin by category are internal. Two weeks with a client's CRM and finance teams would replace my numbers with theirs, and the boosts line would move most. The KPIs I would own are adoption, loyalty participation, retention and margin per active member, with NPS as a guardrail.
02/Fit
Where my experience fits, and where it doesn't
Consumer product ownership
At Ifolor I owned the e-commerce ecosystem and strategy for a CHF 100M+ business, reporting to C-level. Every roadmap decision was also a margin decision. The work was customer research, A/B testing and analytics, on Magento and GA4, across web and app.
Ifolor Group, Senior Product Manager and Lead E-Commerce, Oct 2024 to Jul 2025: +9% conversion, +15% checkout step rate, cross-functional team plus external agencies, own budget and KPIs.
Promotion economics
Points are trade promotion with a login. My first years were spent planning consumer and trade promotions, building the calculations behind them and negotiating with brand manufacturers. At Swiss Post I size AI-driven business opportunities and turn them into a prioritised roadmap with KPIs, including build-versus-buy and cost-versus-benefit calls.
Promena, Cruspi, Domaco, 2010 to 2016: own brand portfolio, promotion planning, pricing calculations, monthly sales reporting. Swiss Post, AI Project Lead since Jan 2026: sales time down 30%, proposal feedback time down 90% via a synthetic pitch-check avatar I built.
The gap in my experience
I haven't run a loyalty programme or worked with Salesforce Loyalty Cloud. My relevant experience sits underneath the programme: consumer product ownership, promotion economics, retention work and commercial accountability. If you need someone who has already managed a rewards ecosystem end to end, I'm not that person.
03/CV
Experience
AI Project Lead, Business Development
AI-driven business models from opportunity sizing to a prioritised roadmap with KPIs, build-versus-buy calls, and delivery from concept to launch. Sales time down 30%, proposal feedback time down 90%.
Founder
A live consumer product I built end to end, with 331 hand-picked routes across 12 countries and real users.
In between jobs and own ventures
Built smedium (first clients, websites shipped, AI workflows automated), grew Pedal Peak, and went deep on AI tooling and prompt engineering. Also cycled in Togo and Benin.
Senior Product Manager, Lead E-Commerce
Owned the e-commerce ecosystem and strategy for a CHF 100M+ business, reporting to C-level. +9% conversion, +15% checkout step rate through research, A/B testing and analytics.
Lead Project Manager
Owned client partnerships with UBS and Baloise, working between senior client stakeholders and the internal product team.
Marketing & Growth Lead, Founding Team
Founding team of a health venture: two funding rounds closed, 10 locations, 23 people, 170+ customers, and 1000+ client matches in year one.
Growth & Venture Builder
Go-to-market for several internal startups from validation to scale-up, with experimentation to lift conversion and cut acquisition cost.
Intrapreneur, Innovation
Market pilots from MVP to launch: Smide (now BOND Mobility), XpertCheck, Lizzy. Owned the MVPs, ran market experiments and managed agencies.
Earlier: Junior Trade Marketing Manager at Promena (2016), Junior Product Manager at Cruspi (2014 to 2015), Assistant Product Manager at Domaco (2010 to 2014), Accountant at Kuoni and AMAG (2008 to 2010), commercial apprenticeship at Bridgestone Switzerland (2005 to 2008). This is the retail and FMCG experience the ad asks for.
04/About
Where this comes from
My first job in product marketing was working out whether a promotion would pay for itself. Volume forecast, what the trade would fund, what we would have sold anyway. If the sums were wrong the promotion still ran, and somebody found out three months later.
Sixteen years later the mechanics moved into an app and got a points balance. The question did not change. That is the part of product work I like most, and the reason I built the ledger instead of writing a roadmap.
Outside work I ride a lot, which turned into Pedal Peak, a cycling platform I built and still run. It taught me what a week of real user feedback does to a plan.