This document summarizes Marks and Spencer's journey to modernizing its digital capabilities over three years. It overhauled 80 applications and 132 interfaces to handle high online traffic. Key changes included implementing a new product information management system, loyalty program, and marketing tools. Challenges included navigation and checkout issues on the new site. The company improved through agile delivery methods, emphasizing quick iterations, automation testing, and continuous measurement and learning from user experiences. This led to faster delivery cycles and improved performance.

1. An illustrated story of a 130 years Old Main Street
Retailer’s Journey to a Digital Native
MARKS AND SPENCER’S
MARTECH MAKEOVER
October 20th 2015

2. 2

3. 3

4. 4
INTERNATIONAL

5. 5

6. 7
MORE THAN JUST A WEBSITE
Product Information Management OMS Business Intelligence
Middleware & Infrastructure
M&S Operational Systems
Content MgmtMerch (Merchandising) Loyalty & CIMProfile & Personalisation
MarketingeStore Customer Service

7. 8
ORGANISING IDEA:
“Everyday
Inspiration”
M&S is a daily source of inspiration
for customer and staff alike.

8. 9

9. 10
EVERYDAY INSPIRATION

10. 11
80 Applications
132 Interfaces

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Tuned and scaled to handle
40K orders and 3M page
views an hour

12. 13
Went live on
a date committed
three years back

13. Why did we suceed
One Team

14. If you build it,
they will come
Or not!

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SO WHAT WENT WRONG?
Design failures
• 3 tier navigation
• No guest checkout

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STABLE PLATFORM

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THE KEY TAKEAWAY
“There is no single development in either
technology or in management technique,
that by itself promises even one order-of-
magnitude improvement in productivity,
in reliability, in simplicity
Fredrick Brookes
No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering

19. How did we do it
Agile Delivery
– ByteSize!

20. Product Teams

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BYTESIZE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
MVP
Build
Measure
Learn
Idea
CodeData

22. 23
PAGE LOAD TIME IMPACTS CONVERSION
Knowledge is power
Business and stake holder visualisations
Monitoring marketing campaign experience of
speed
Product Team Dashboards for Sprints tests and…
Command Centre and IT Ops Dashboards …data from live user experiences

23. Performance –
Every millisecond counts!

24. Test Automation used to
improve speed of delivery

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AUTOMATION USED TO IMPROVE SPEED
Coverage & Effect
• Regression testing reduced from 5 days to
1 day / release
• Automation testing after each build saves
40-man days of effort per month
• Increased browser coverage;
• IE9, IE10, IE11, Firefox, Chrome, iOS
• No regression defects introduced since
April, in spite of the amount of change per
release increasing
120%
0%
20%
40%
80%
100%
60%
10
9
0
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
R6 R7 R8 R10 R11 R13 R14 R15
0 P1 & P2s since R11
Releases
70%
PercentageCoverage
Noofdefects
Regression defects
Manual effort
Sanity coverage

26. 29
THE KEY TAKEAWAY
“There is no single development in either
technology or in management technique,
that by itself promises even one order-of-
magnitude improvement in productivity,
in reliability, in simplicity
Fredrick Brookes
No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering
• Do the simple things first, quick wins are
important
• Don’t be afraid to fail, but fail fast and move on
Bytesize
Automat
ion
Measure
ment
Experim
entation
culture
Autono
my
Perform
ance
RUM
NO OPS
Release
on
demand

27. 13.8%

28. 38.7%

29. 32

30. 20% Off
OCT20SU

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