Case Study
Gap, Inc.
User-Driven Lean Product Development
Context
Gap, Inc. had thousands of domestic stores and no unified digital source that pulls together their sales, forecast and inventory information for regular analysis.
Regional, District, and Store managers at Gap Stores across the world measure key indicators throughout the day to see how Gap, Inc. stores are doing and how they need to adjust to meet their goals. The problem is, they have to pull reports from 10+ sources to do so, often printing paper which is both wasteful and time-consuming, and most importantly takes valuable time from the sales floor.
Challenge
Take an early-stage product, validate it, and prepare it for release to all domestic locations; convince stakeholders to listen to user feedback along the way.
An early solution had a few foreign users and showed promise, but needed a lot of work to be rolled out to Gap US stores, which was our mission. Further, the app suffered from many stakeholders across the organization with competing agendas.
We campaigned to incorporate user feedback in our product development process, collecting real data to unify the direction.
Approach
Enlisting three local stores to partner with product development, develop a weekly cadence of testing prototypes with store managers – the actual users – right on the sales floor.
Leveraging this qualitative data, we clarified our roadmap, making quick, effective iterations in product development, and forced stakeholders to align around the data. This put the product development team in the driver’s seat to define and prioritize the roadmap against the business objectives.
Iteratively developing prototypes and testing them allowed us to define the features and iterate on their execution.
Key Findings
Wifi in stores needed to be rethought.
The application was intended to be pulled up in front of in-store displays relevant to the data. Doing so in testing revealed serious issues with Wifi coverage which required months to work through so the application could be effective. Notably, the staff was already suffering from this problem but didn’t have a voice until this product came along. If we hadn’t done a validated learning approach, experimenting along the way, we would have delayed launch by months.
The needs of Regional Managers are completely different than Store Managers.
Although user experience people could probably anticipate this finding, the stakeholders had made a dangerous business assumption that they were the same. The process of getting to know our users through co-development built a hearty appreciation of the necessary differences for each audience, setting the team up for buy-in and roadmap prioritization.
Outcome
In less than a year, we rolled out across North America, taking the app from 15 Weekly Active Users (WAU) to 2800+ WAU, and in the first 6 months, we were able to reallocate 150,000+ hours previously spent pulling, printing, and analyzing reports back to the sales floor, so teams can focus on customers.
The application has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from field teams across the organization; store managers even gave it a standing ovation at the annual corporate meeting.
“Zhaus&Co are great listeners who build empathy for users, possessing a disciplined approach that allows them to pull the best out of everyone they collaborate with, and an openness to collaborate with product development teams and business stakeholders. ”
— Angie Hanna-Bugueiro, Director of Product Management, Gap Inc.