Pret is the operator of sandwich shop chain intended to offer natural, preservative-free food products. The company offers sandwiches, baguettes, pots and desserts, cold drinks, hot drinks, crisps and bakery items, as well as sushi, salads, soups and cakes, ensuring customers are served freshly made and organic food.

The Challenge

Pret challenged us to work with a 50 strong digital team requiring restructuring, redesigning, levelling up, and innovating for the consumer. Specifically, they needed:

  • Design a framework to restructure the teams organised under 3 key pillars
  • Collaborate with the digital leadership whom in parallel are selecting a new global vendor to supply off shore software engineering support to replace two incumbent suppliers.
  • Level up the standard of the cross-functional teams (standard scrum sized teams 8-10 people), working alongside horizontally shared UX, Service Design and Research teams.
  • Create new coffee subscription engineering team

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion is huge for Pret Digital, so we were tasked with supplying a minimum of 50% diversity in all long list and candidate pipelines.

We were briefed to only introduce intellectually curious, compassionate people who would like to expand their skills whilst working with a customer first mindset.

We were to collaborate with an internal team that was at capacity and with no time to manage processes, direct applications or searches.

The Outcome

We designed an extensive ED&I aware market map to deliver a minimum 50% diverse short list. To maintain a diverse and inclusive candidate pipeline and process, all job ads and outreach messages were gender decoded.

We curated unique content to position a traditional retail business as a new, innovative and exciting digital transformative company to work for. We also produced comprehensive candidate welcome packs to showcase Pret and positively increase the candidate experience.

We put together a team to take accountability for growing the Product team and efficiently managed the entire process.

Pret’s internal talent team worked closely with us to manage both pipelines of external and internal applicants in tandem, operating as one team.

We reported weekly on a clearly defined and collaborative process, conducting in-depth discovery calls for each role to unpick the key requirements for technical and cultural skillsets.

Hires:

  • Interim Digital Director
  • 3x Senior Product Managers
  • Programme Management Portfolio Lead
  • UX Lead
  • Contract Software Engineers