VS&Co Agile & Design Ops

In addition to digital product design, I also led the platform agile & design operations team for Victoria’s Secret & Co. This was a team of managers and scrum masters who were responsible for our planning process, the management and configuration of our collaboration and workflow tools, and various reporting activities.

While operations teams are often considered to be those who manage “process” I take a very different view: while we did not determine the “why” or the “what” of our work, we were accountable for the how. As such, this team played a large role in determining the culture of our digital organization. I took this stewardship very seriously and considered it to be as important as my role in user experience design.

Continuous improvement often involves change and transformation. I applied the same principles here as I do with the rest of my work: I treated key changes as experiments and commited to gathering feedback via specific time-boxes and scope-boxes (often via the concept of a minimum viable product).

As part of my role, I co-sponsored the introduction of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) into the organization as a way to drive strategic alignment and focus across our 20+ product teams — a challenge common to enterprise technology organizations. I co-led a working group to address the change management by building consensus for this framework, educating and coaching on the methods and creating a clear plan of action.