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Business Need
Business Need
At the onset of the pandemic, retail faced unprecedented shutdowns and uncertainty. Gap, Inc. needed to rapidly innovate its e-commerce capabilities across Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, and Athleta. This required 6X more workload and 4X larger product engineering teams, including the team managing the Design System, which underpinned all UI development for seven other e-commerce and marketing teams.
Challenge
Challenge
The Design System team was key to enabling high-quality, reusable components for other engineerinng teams—but had a unique creative culture. With 25+ members accustomed to minimal structure, Brenda had to:
Respect their self-determination and creative workflow
Introduce predictability without stifling autonomy
Balance unplanned support requests from multiple brands with iteration commitments
Without intervention, user stories repeatedly carried over, creating pressure from the business to deliver more, faster, and predictably.
Approach
Brenda applied a human-centered, incremental approach:
Observation: Spent time understanding team dynamics and workflows.
Small impactful changes: Introduced prioritization by moving the most valuable user stories to the top of the backlog, helping the team stay focused.
Gathered metrics and feedback every two weeks, demonstrating how new practices improved clarity and efficiency.
Scaled improvements: Once adoption stabilized, used average iteration capacity to plan and prioritize work more predictably.
Results
Team fully embraced the new workflow without feeling constrained.
Improved focus allowed for faster development, clearer goals, and shorter meetings.
Performance metrics:
Committed vs resolved user stories improved from <50% to 100%
Average cycle time reduced by 3 days compared to the rest of the organization
Less back-and-forth communication freed time for creative work.
Gap, Inc. launched new e-commerce features in time for peak season, with Black Friday breaking all-time U.S. order records.
"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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