The gist

My role sat directly between two teams, and my skillset spanned across enough areas of our internal system that I was able to clearly see several areas where efficiencies were being lost – so I was able to bring the two teams together to create less friction in the process of site maintenance and content updates that happened on a regular basis. The new system I helped set in place, with the thoughtful feedback of the teams, led to massive time savings for everyone – and a lot less tension between the two teams.

How it happened

To explain this without getting into the nitty-gritty details of team structure at icebreaker, let's just leave it at saying: it took two teams to accomplish one very regular and uninspiring task: Content updates each time a new season or promotion rolled around. It was the most frequent thing that happened, but the process was filled with wrinkles that led to a lot of tension between the two teams involved. The marketing team would create the designs and assets. The digital team would place those assets into the code slots. Intent never aligned with reality. Nobody understood why. But I could see both worlds. And I knew I could make the experience all around better for the people I worked next to every day. I am an user experience designer after all.

I first worked with the digital team to understand their biggest pain points. Then, I turned my focus to the design team to see what their processes involved, and where might there be room for improvements. As it turned out, both teams were essentially operating with at least one hand tied behind their back, so-to-speak. The code template the digital team was working with gave them about as much flexibility with content placement as a cement-filled steel box. And the tools the design team were using to create the assets gave them no insight into how their images and copy would actually look in the existing code template.

Over the course of a few weeks I worked with a developer to create an enhanced code template that opened up much greater flexibility for the fluctuating assets and content that the design team would provide to them. And I worked with the design team to create a new templated process for generating those assets, which included bringing them up to speed on how to use Sketch instead of Photoshop to save time and effort in the long run. By aligning both teams into a streamlined process, we created a much smoother experience from beginning to end. The designers didn't have to spend as much time creating assets, and later adjusting them to work in the reality of the code. And the digital team didn't have to spend as much time writing custom code and replacing assets multiple times. Instead of each new round of updates taking multiple days, it could all be done within a single day. Now that’s working smarter, not harder.

Mission successful.

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