You think you need to reduce personalisation to keep it manageable. In reality, you need more personalisation, built in a smarter way.

While working with a QSR brand, we found ourselves in a familiar debate.

The Digital Growth Manager had seen the positive results from a small A/B test on personalisation and wanted more relevance in the app immediately. More segments. More tailored journeys. More precision.

The CRM lead went quiet. For them, this did not feel like relevance. It felt like a production line that was already under pressure, with a new variation being added every few minutes. More logic. More setup. More checks. More ways for the whole thing to slow down or break.

Both sides were right. 

Personalisation is not the issue. Poorly designed execution is. Most teams do not struggle because they personalise too much. They struggle because the system behind it cannot carry the complexity.

That is where many teams make the wrong move. They respond by doing less. We did the opposite. We kept the ambition, but redesigned the system around it.

More personalisation was possible in theory. It just was not workable in the way it had been set up.

The workload dropped by 60%, while tests showed a 6% uplift in profit.

We did that by:

• Defining a smaller number of meaningful decision moments. Instead of trying to personalise everything, we focused on the moments that influenced behaviour.
• Grouping customers in a way that was commercially useful and operationally manageable. We moved away from overly granular setups and built groups large enough to matter commercially, but specific enough to stay relevant in execution.
• Deciding outside the platform which offer logic should apply. That gave the team more control without turning the setup into a manual mess.
• Making the setup easier to test, repeat and optimise. Once the structure became simpler, it also became easier to improve.

That changed the conversation. The team no longer had to choose between relevance and manageability.

The strongest personalisation models are not the most complicated. They are the ones a team can actually run.

What creates more friction in your organisation today: deciding how to personalise or executing it consistently?