Balancing Creativity and Operational Clarity at Scale
Balancing Creativity and Operational Clarity at Scale
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Business Need
Business Need
At the onset of the pandemic, Gap Inc. needed to rapidly expand its digital commerce capabilities to meet shifting customer behaviors and unprecedented demand for online experiences. Supporting Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, and Athleta required scaling product engineering capacity by 4X and increasing workload by 6X—including the Design System team responsible for enabling consistent, reusable components across seven e-commerce and marketing teams. As an embedded Agile consultant, Brenda was brought in to help the Design System team introduce greater clarity, prioritization, and delivery predictability while preserving the creative autonomy that made the team effective.
Challenge
Challenge
The Design System team played a critical role in enabling consistent, high-quality digital experiences across brands, but its creative culture was built around flexibility and autonomy.
As demand increased, the team needed to:
Preserve creative autonomy while introducing greater visibility and predictability.
Create prioritization practices that balanced planned commitments with evolving support needs from multiple brands.
Improve delivery consistency as business demand increased without adding unnecessary process overhead.
Without intervention, user stories repeatedly carried over between iterations, creating pressure from business stakeholders to deliver more quickly and predictably.
Approach
Approach
Brenda applied a human-centered, incremental approach focused on building trust, improving clarity, and supporting sustainable change:
Observe and understand:
Immersed herself in team dynamics, workflows, and existing practices to understand opportunities for improvement without disrupting creative momentum.Introduce targeted improvements:
Implemented lightweight prioritization practices that surfaced the highest-value work while maintaining team autonomy and flexibility.Build trust through transparency:
Shared performance insights and team feedback every two weeks, demonstrating the impact of new practices and enabling continuous adjustment.Scale what worked:
Used team capacity data to improve planning, predictability, and alignment across brand stakeholders.
Results
Results
Enabled the Design System team to increase delivery predictability while maintaining a creative, autonomous working culture.
Improved focus and collaboration, reducing unnecessary communication cycles and freeing time for higher-value creative work.
Increased committed versus completed user stories from less than 50% to 100%.
Reduced average cycle time by three days compared to the broader organization.
Supported the successful launch of new e-commerce capabilities ahead of peak season, contributing to Gap Inc.’s record-breaking U.S. Black Friday order volume.
This engagement demonstrates how thoughtful operating models can help creative teams maintain their unique strengths while building the clarity and alignment needed to scale.
"Brenda was able to balance nurturing the needs of the team and meeting the highly demanding business needs of the company with ease. Having her made the team not only productive, but also enjoyable. As someone who worked with Brenda daily, I can vouch for her enthusiasm, work, and keen ability to keep the team motivated and happy."
Lisa Lehrman, Sr Software Engineer, Gap, Inc.
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