Courtney Kissler, Vice President of E-Commerce and Store Technologies, Nordstrom We started our technology transformation about 2 years ago. It started with a move to “agile”. I’d love to share what we learned from the experience and where we are on that journey. We went from agile transformation to focusing on a leadership development program (which then became an exercise in defining our culture) to a technology strategy story which includes creating a culture of continuous improvement. We have varying maturity levels within our organization. I’d like to share our customer mobile story as a case study in CD/DevOps and continuous flow. I can also share where other teams are at and how we’ve approached the challenge. Scaling this is another challenge we are currently discussing. I can share our plans for how we are approaching it and what we have learned so far.

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2. • 63,000 employees
(1,800 technology)
• $12.5B in revenue

3. 3
Context: Our Business & Technology Challenge
Our business ambitions have dramatically increased in terms of complexity, scale &
speed and technology is increasingly critical in all parts of our business
.com
CUSTOMER CUSTOMER
.com
Technology as The Key Enabler

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5. Photo by 401(K) 2013 - Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License https://www.flickr.com/photos/68751915@N05 Created with Haiku Deck

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10. Quality & Throughput
June 13 Sep 13 Dec 13 Mar 14 June 14
Bugs
Features per month
Sep 14

11. Release 1
= BEFORE
= NOW
Jan Feb Mar Apr May June July Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec
Release 2
RESULTS:
DEPLOYMENT/RELEASE
FREQUENCY

13. STORY: RESTAURANT RE-CONCEPTS
Some context:
• 11 re-concepts completed in 2013
• 44 planned in 2014
• 30+ high impacting incidents in 2 months
Business leader phone call – “you need to triple
the size of your team….”
My response – “that’s one way to solve it….”

14. RESULTS: RESTAURANT CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

15. What I want to leave you with….
• PEOPLE - #1 asset
• Everything we build should be about the customer –
ask ourselves “would the customer value that?”
• Passionate belief in continuous improvement as a
critical component of how we get work done in the
future – need to create a learning culture
• Be persistent….”keep going”
• Leaders HAVE to evolve

16. If I could wave a magic wand, every leader in the
organization would….
• Honor Reality
• Become a student - Go & See
• Become a teacher – Learning Culture
• Problem Solving
• Improvement Kata
• Lead by Example (actions matching words)
• Ask Why and Articulate Why

17. I could use help with….
• Measurement, specifically throughput
• Case studies
• Stories (good & bad)

18. QUESTIONS?