Marianne Anglard is a Paris-based Product Manager at Rexel, where she has progressed from Product Owner to leading a cross-functional team of around 30 people in the e-commerce sector. With a background in customer experience and retail excellence, she brings a strong customer-focused approach to digital product strategy and international collaboration. In this interview, she shares insights on her career journey, digital product management, leadership, working across cultures, and her experience mentoring young women.

Interviewed by Mireia Brunet

1. You joined Rexel seven years ago as a Product Owner and have since progressed to Senior Product Owner and now Product Manager. What have been the key moments or experiences that shaped your career journey and helped you take on greater responsibility?

It’s actually quite funny because I’ve wanted to work in Product Management since I was in high school. My father is a Product Manager, and when I was younger, he would sometimes tell me about the products he was working on, ask me to test them and give him feedback. I think that’s where my interest in Product really started.

But if I think about what has really shaped my career since joining Rexel almost seven years ago, I would say trust and responsibility have been the two biggest drivers.

One of the first defining moments came just after I finished my work-study program and joined Rexel full-time as a Product Owner. I was given responsibility for the integration of a new Content Management System (CMS) across ten countries. It was a project that my manager was initially supposed to lead, so I remember thinking,“Wow, she really trusts me with this.”

It was a real challenge, combining technology, business needs and change management. But that experience taught me something quite early in my career: not to be afraid of complexity, and that being trusted with responsibility was one of the best ways to grow.

From there, this pattern continued. I was progressively trusted with more complex projects and broader responsibilities. A major turning point came when I was asked to step into the Lead Product Owner role for five months, coordinating the overall webshop product portfolio and the other Product Owners. It gave me the opportunity to prove that I could look beyond my own product scope, create alignment and take responsibility at a broader level.

More recently, I became the Product Manager of a Product Team with around 30 contributors. My role has evolved again: today, I focus on product vision and strategy, objectives and KPIs, prioritisation across teams, and creating alignment between business and technology.

So when I look back, each step in my career has followed the same dynamic: someone trusted me with greater responsibility, I embraced the challenge, and it prepared me for the next one.

I also think this journey reflects Rexel’s broader commitment to helping people grow and take on greater responsibility, including supporting women in progressing towards leadership positions. For me, having managers who trusted me with challenging opportunities has made that commitment very concrete throughout my career.

“That experience taught me something quite early in my career: not to be afraid of complexity”

2. You moved from a background in customer experience and retail excellence into product management. How has your customer-focused perspective influenced the way you approach product strategy today?

My background in Customer Experience has definitely shaped the way I approach Product Management today. I always start with a deep understanding of the customer, rather than from the solution we want to build.

For most of the major products or features I’ve worked on, I’ve had the opportunity to talk directly to customers through interviews and user testing platforms. I find that extremely valuable because it helps us understand not only what customers say they want, but also what they are actually trying to achieve, what frustrates them and where they struggle.

However, being customer-focused is also about looking one step ahead. By understanding customers’ behaviours, pain points and how their needs are evolving, we can identify opportunities they may not explicitly ask for and propose new solutions that make their experience easier.

And the customer conversation shouldn’t stop once the product is launched. We’re lucky to have different surveys across our webshops where customers can continuously share feedback about their experience and about new features. That helps us understand whether what we delivered created the value we expected.

For me, being customer-focused doesn’t mean saying yes to every customer request. Customers are essential in helping us understand their needs, but it’s our role as a Product team to go further, identify emerging needs and find the right solution.

So I would say my customer experience background has given me a habit that I still have today: listen carefully to today’s needs, keep an eye on tomorrow’s, and continue learning from customers after you launch.

“ My customer experience background has given me a habit that I still have today: listen carefully to today’s needs, keep an eye on tomorrow’s, and continue learning from customers after you launch”

3. As someone working in product management and digital technology: What do you think makes a digital product successful today, and how do you see the role of product teams evolving as technology and customer expectations continue to change?

For me, a successful digital product needs to create both customer value and business value. It always starts with understanding a meaningful customer need, and then finding the right level of investment to address it in a way that creates value for both the customer and the business. Finding that balance is key.

I also believe successful digital products should be intuitive and make things simpler for customers. Sometimes, innovation is not about building something extremely sophisticated, but about removing friction. For example, when we redesigned our product detail page, one of the features customers appreciated most was simply being able to copy a product reference with one click. It was a small change, but it made a frequent task easier. For me, that’s a good reminder that sometimes the best innovation is simply making your customer’s life easier.

At the same time, the role of product teams is evolving very quickly, especially with AI. We can already use AI to support discovery, analyse customer feedback, accelerate development or help with product strategy. But I don’t think that makes the product role less important. On the contrary, I think it makes human judgement even more important: understanding which customer problems are really worth solving, challenging what AI suggests rather than simply accepting it, making the right trade-offs, and ultimately deciding where we can create the most value.

If technology allows us to build faster, being able to build something is no longer the most important question. The real question is: should we build it, and why? Technology may change how we build products, but the fundamentals remain the same: deeply understand your customers, create value for both the customer and the business, and make people’s lives easier.

“Sometimes the best innovation is simply making your customer’s life easier”

4. Looking at the pace of evolution of the digital and technology landscapes, what skills do you think are becoming increasingly important for women who want to build and progress in careers in this field?

I would start with confidence. And maybe more specifically, the confidence to take on something you don’t know how to do yet. In digital and technology, everything evolves so quickly that you cannot wait until you feel like an expert before taking on a new challenge. That’s something I’ve experienced myself. Some of the biggest opportunities in my career came from accepting projects or responsibilities that initially looked very complex. You don’t need to know everything before you start. You can learn, and very often, you learn by doing.

The second skill I would mention is curiosity. New technologies, new tools and new ways of working are constantly emerging, especially with AI. So you need to keep learning, experimenting and understanding how technology can help you work differently.

But at the same time, I think human skills are becoming even more important. In product management, you need to listen, communicate, influence, convince and bring people together. Technology can help us work faster, but it cannot replace the human relationships behind collaboration and leadership.

And for women who want to progress, I also think it’s important to make yourself visible through your contribution. Get involved in initiatives, share your ideas and don’t be afraid to say that you want to grow. But progression shouldn’t mean being available all the time. I strongly believe you can be ambitious and dedicated while balancing your personal life and your energy put in your career.

So if I had to summarise it, I would say: be confident enough to try, curious enough to keep learning, and human enough to bring people with you.

“Be confident enough to try, curious enough to keep learning, and human enough to bring people with you”

5. You work across eight countries, from France and Germany to Canada and Australia. How do you effectively collaborate with stakeholders who have different functions, cultures and levels of seniority?

I think this is one of the biggest challenges of my role, but also one of the things I enjoy the most. When you work across different countries, functions and levels of seniority, the first thing is to build relationships over time. I’ve had the opportunity to meet most of the countries I work with in person, and sometimes to visit them locally. It makes a real difference. Once you know people better, you understand how they work, how they communicate and what matters to them.

The second important element is trust and credibility. Especially when I was younger and less experienced, I realised that I needed to demonstrate that I knew the topics, that I was prepared and reliable. Over time, that builds trust, and discussions become much easier, including when you disagree.

When there are difficult conversations, I try to bring the discussion back to facts and objectives. It’s very easy to end up with “I like this” or “I don’t like that.” Instead, I try to explain the problem we are solving, why we are proposing a particular solution and what the different trade-offs are.

Transparency is also important. Sometimes there simply isn’t a perfect solution for every country. In those situations, I’m comfortable saying: “We have a challenge here. We need to find a compromise, and we need to find it together.” For me, collaboration is not about convincing everyone that I am right. It’s about finding the best solution we can collectively support.

Cultural differences are also something you learn to navigate with experience. Over time, you understand that the same discussion may need to be approached differently depending on the people and the country. And with someone who is newer or less experienced, I think you need to invest more time in explaining the context and helping them become autonomous.

So for me, effective stakeholder management is really a combination of relationships, credibility, objectivity and adaptability. And honestly, that’s one of the reasons I enjoy working internationally so much. Every country is different, every stakeholder is different, and I never get bored.

“When you work across different countries, functions and levels of seniority, the first thing is to build relationships over time”

6. You have volunteered with Capital Filles for four years, mentoring high school girls from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. What have you learned from that experience, and has mentoring influenced your perspective on leadership?

What I’ve learned from mentoring is that sometimes talent is already there, but confidence or access to information is missing.

Over the past four years with Capital Filles, I’ve met very different profiles. Some of the girls I mentored had very good academic results and clearly had the potential to pursue ambitious studies, but they didn’t necessarily know all the opportunities that were available to them.

I remember one girl in particular who had excellent results but was considering only one possible path for her future. Through our conversations, I realised that what she needed wasn’t someone to tell her what to do. She needed someone to help her explore other possibilities, understand the opportunities available to her and, most importantly, realise that she was capable of succeeding.

A big part of my role was simply to encourage her, build her confidence and help her understand that she had more options than she thought. And I think this has definitely influenced my perspective on leadership.

For me, being a leader is not only about making decisions, giving direction or delivering results. It’s also about helping other people grow and become confident in their own abilities. That means investing time in people, giving honest and constructive feedback, encouraging them when they need it, and recognising their progress and contribution.

There is a strong parallel with mentoring: you can’t make decisions for someone else, but you can give them the support, confidence and information they need to make those decisions themselves. That’s probably one of the biggest things mentoring has taught me about leadership: a good leader doesn’t just help people perform. A good leader helps people realise what they are capable of.

“A good leader doesn’t just help people perform. A good leader helps people realise what they are capable of”