Retail · Team building and delivery
Building teams that take ownership of delivery
I led a multidisciplinary technology team as it grew from one person to about 50. Along the way, we developed managers, made priorities a shared decision with the business and gave teams more responsibility for delivery.
Growing with the work
I started as a director without a team. As we delivered projects and built relationships, the business trusted us with more work. Over time, the portfolio expanded across supplier and product information, purchasing, demand planning, replenishment and logistics.
The team grew to about 50 people in product management, business analysis, data engineering and software development. We worked across eight locations and four time zones. My responsibility was to develop the people and the way we worked as the scope grew.
Staying close to people
I held weekly one-to-one meetings with my direct reports and made myself available between meetings whenever possible. Those conversations gave us time to discuss decisions, concerns, development and situations that needed support.
As managers and specialist roles became part of the team, I worked with them to take on more responsibility and build direct relationships with business leaders. I wanted people to have room to make decisions, with access to support when they needed it.
Making priorities a shared decision
We matured in Agile practices gradually. First, we created a shared backlog so we could see the work in one place. Then we brought business partners into prioritization and began planning in two-week sprints. As the teams became more comfortable with that discipline, we introduced estimation with story points and used velocity and burn-down charts to understand capacity and follow delivery.
The practices became useful as they helped us make choices together. If a request was not in the current sprint, people could see what we were working on instead and discuss the trade-off. That made priorities a conversation between business and technology, with capacity and commitments in view.
On some projects, external consultants worked alongside our own people, using the same board and planning process. That helped us coordinate the work as one team.
What changed
We developed a broader set of capabilities and a more consistent way to organize delivery. Managers and teams took on more decisions, while business partners had a clearer view of priorities, commitments and work still waiting.
Growing the team meant paying attention to those relationships and habits throughout the process. Hiring was one part of it; helping people work well together was an ongoing responsibility.