Challenge

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

2. They had unique creative culture and working styles. The Principal Consultant 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 of the reasons, they had to service to other teams with unplanned work and also respond to ad-hoc requests from various brands. However, such dynamic led to carryovers of user stories iteration after iteration and there was more pressure from the business for accountability; to deliver more and on timely manner.

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.

Approach

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

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

• Share the benefits of new approaches. The Principal Consultant gathered performance metrics every two weeks and 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 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 creative development work as meetings got faster and goals more clear.

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

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