Business Need

It was the beginning of the pandemic. The retail industry got hit by shutdowns and uncertainty. In order to stay competitive Gap, Inc. had to quickly innovate its e-commerce capabilities. More features needed to be released, resulting in 6X more workload and 4X increased team size for product engineering teams. That included the team responsible for the Design System. 

I joined as a Sr. Consultant (via a consulting firm) and 100% embedded with 3-4 of Gap teams to enable them for agile delivery.

Challenge

1. The Design System was pivotal in enabling 7 other e-commerce and marketing UI teams to be more efficient by creating high quality reusable components.

2. The team had a unique creative culture and working style. In my role as Agile Team Coach, I had to strike a balance between enabling them for predictable delivery while respecting self-determination.

3. The 25+ members of the team preferred to work with minimal structure and processes. One reason was they had to service other teams with unplanned work and also respond to ad-hoc requests from various brands. However, this  dynamic led to carryovers of user stories iteration after iteration and there was more pressure from the business for accountability; to deliver more and in a timely manner.

Approach

• Observation. The very first step was to get to know the team members and observe their workflow. 

• Next, propose small but impactful changes for prioritization and planning when I felt the time was right. The recommendation was to move the most valuable user stories to the top of the backlog as a new way to plan and help them keep focused. 

• Then, I shared the benefits of new approaches. I gathered performance metrics every two weeks along with feedback from the team members, product owners and tech leads. 

• Once they got comfortable with the new workflows, the next step was to present the advantages of using their average capacity (velocity) per iteration to plan and prioritize.

Results

After a couple of weeks the team fully welcomed the new ways of working as something that was not in conflict with their values. 

With better prioritization the Design team enjoyed more time to focus on their development work as meetings got faster and goals more clear.

Less time taken away from team members communicating back and forth on feature status to program managers and leadership. 

Improved performance and trust, as shown in the following metrics: from less than 50% up to 100% of committed vs resolved user stories and average cycle times of 3 days faster than the rest of the organization. 

Gap, Inc. benefited from new e-commerce capabilities just in time for the peak season. Black Friday that year broke the all time record for total orders in the USA.