Streamlining E-Commerce: A Focused Approach on Communication, Requirements, and Testing in Agile SDLC

Transcript

Hello, everyone. Welcome to our Adobe Experience Makers. Learn from Your Peers series. Today we have an awesome presentation for you streamlining e-commerce, a focused approach and requirements testing and communication in Agile SDLC. My name is Connor Hatfield. I’ll be the host for today. I’m part of Adobe’s adoption marketing team and Experience Cloud. And before we pass it off to our guest speaker for today, I did want to just take us through a few housekeeping items. So we have a resources section for you. In our resources section, you can download today’s slides. And we also have a number of Adobe Commerce resources for you. Please feel free throughout the presentation to ask questions and we will cue them up for our Q&A at the end. And we also have our attendee chat and we can get that started right now. Feel free to type in where you’re tuning in from today and feel free to use it throughout today’s presentation. And just a quick call out that we will send out the recording and the slides afterwards after today’s webinar. And without further ado, let’s let’s go ahead and and get into our speaker for today. So today we are very fortunate to have Tyler Granlund with us. Tyler is a seasoned product management professional known for his technical expertise and creative vision from product catalog architecture to integration optimization and feature enhancement. Tyler combines a deep understanding of e commerce tech management with a passion for design and efficient solutions. Past companies like Outdoor Camp and School of Rock. Tyler has led transfer transformative digital initiatives, revolutionizing a new vision for B2B e-commerce experiences and pioneering a new vision for custom order processes. And with without further ado, let’s welcome Tyler here. Thanks, everyone. Super excited to be here and very excited to talk about a bunch of different topics and make sure and be passionate about. Before we go over today’s agenda, I just want to emphasize, like Connor said, this is recorded. And so we are going to go over some high level concepts that you may or may not be familiar with. At the end of the day, this is going to be an ongoing resource that you should be able to reference and utilize within your organization to make sure that you’re following some of the key highlights. And as we know, with the changing landscaping, our changing landscape of technology, we all know that these things can change over time. And so as things iterate, we’ll be sure to make sure that these things are updated. But for right now, what I want to do is really talk about what I found in my past experience to really help revolutionize some of the ways of working within your team, but also really make sure that you are customer centric with a lot of your initiatives and best practices. So for today, we are going to just speak on the overview of Agile software development lifecycle. So when you see SDLC, it is software development lifecycle. Just keep that in mind. We’re going to talk about a focus, a focus on communication requirements and testing. These are some of the core fundamentals of this concept. And so we really want to dive into the weeds and make sure that you truly understand this going forward. Then we’re going to go ahead and look at how we can apply this. Agile SDLC practices to your Adobe Commerce upgrade. There’s a lot of specific big picture initiatives that you may be looking to do within your organization, but we all know with Adobe Commerce making sure an upgrade goes smoothly is definitely paramount when it comes to your e-commerce website. And we’re going to go out and end it with a Q&A and make sure that we address all your guys as questions and anything we can’t get to today because of time. We’ll make sure we follow up with you shortly after. So let’s get started. I want to start off today by really emphasizing the impact mission above all else. Anything that we talk about today should really emphasize this mission statement and help everyone understand that this is going to be something that you can reference when it comes to all of your big picture projects within your company. So by integrating Agile methodologies into your department processes, you’re going to enhance flexibility and responsiveness. Your strategic vision should guide each step to align with the broader goals and which will ultimately contribute significantly to your sustained organization’s success. So this is, above all else, the true why behind what we’re what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. And so when we think about all the different concepts we talk about today, just make sure that you always look back to that as the why behind it. So when it comes to the significance of EA efficient e-commerce development, there’s a bunch of different things that you could say that you’d want to speak to or focus on. But we’ve narrowed it down to five core fundamentals. So you want to be customer centric. Basically making sure that you have that continuous feedback coming in July to be providing a more tailored user experience. You won’t have rapid iterations. So by incorporating the customer feedback and applying that customer feedback at a rapid pace in improved customer satisfaction, you want to have this enhanced usability. So basically, by having these incremental deliveries and having your regular testing, it will contribute to an overall higher quality product and your customer needs. And then alignment with Agile SDLC, this is the core fundamental architecture in the system that’s going to allow to have you cater to those growing demands and have increased user activity. And then number five, market adaptability. So being able to quickly respond to the ever changing markets really is going to allow you to evolve to your customer demands. But as much as I love to keep you guys here all day and talk about all these at length, the foundation of what today’s presentation is going to be on, is that true alignment with Agile SDLC? And more specifically, we’re going to hone in on what I consider the anchor components to the success of your organization in your ability to implement a proper development lifecycle for your product. So the core fundamentals are really going to come down to your communication to basically, again, facilitate that collaboration, knowledge sharing and ensure everyone is on the same page. Communication is paramount planning and requirements. So planning your requirements is something that’s going to allow for efficient resource allocation, but also make sure that you’re navigating risk management. And again, speaking to your customer needs. And then finally, one of my absolute favorite things to dive into the weeds and just really get into the nitty gritty and it’s the testing component. So testing excellence really identified, helps you identify and fix issues early, but also is going to lead to improved customer satisfaction. So let’s get right into it and talk about how we’re going to navigate stakeholder and team communication in an effective way. But before we do that, we want to talk about best practices, and then we’re going to look into a typical use case. So when you think about best practices for communication, depending on what department you talk to, there’s a lot of different things that people can navigate or speak to What they perceive is important when it comes to product driven growth and making sure that your communication is following all the best practices that it can. This is the list that we kind of have compiled it down to. So we always want to make sure we have that cross department communication to encourage collaboration and make sure those perspectives are heard. We want to make sure we have clear communication channels. Anything that you’re using it to communicate within your organization internally or externally is going to be paramount to make sure that we’re all on the same page and make sure that we’re clear customer feedback integrations. So making sure that you align all of your development and incorporate it to your user preferences so we can all grow the product and make sure that the customers have what they need. Data driven decision making. So data never lies. So by using your data analytics to inform development priorities, it’s going to really help you understand your market trends. Regular review and adoption. It’s actually adaptation use for that type of there. So regular review and adaptation is going to really make sure that you are on top of what’s going on in your iterating as necessary as your product evolves. And then going back to Agile methodology, everything we speak to today is going to encompass Agile methodology, best practices and allow you to be able to facilitate that rapid response to foster a culture of that continuous improvement. We all know that as we go in and navigate our daily lives with technology, things are changing at a rapid pace and right now it’s happening probably quicker than we ever could have imagined. So staying on top of it is key and we want to make sure we have good ways of working spur communication and finally training and development. So if you are not investing in team members ability to understand the changing landscape of this world that we’re in today, especially as it pertains to e-commerce trends, it is going to be detrimental to the success of your business if you don’t invest your your team and development. So let’s get into what we consider a typical use case within an organization. Now, not everyone is going to experience every aspect of this, but I think that any of us have worked at different corporate positions or even worked within a small team where communication is paramount. There is a lot of issues that can come along if you don’t have clear communication channels. So in a typical organization, you’re going to have your internal and external stakeholders that need to be communicated with internally. We know that we want to make the best Adobe Commerce website or website that’s customer facing that we possibly can. And as a result, we need to make sure that within our internal organization we are communicating amongst different departments and we are aware of what each area of the business does. Every single companies organizational structure is going to be different. But today we’re really just showing some examples of what the typical use case would look like and how you navigate it externally when it comes to your website and how you’re going to want to interact with your external stakeholders. You’re going to have your customers or users, suppliers and partners, third party service providers, whether that’s a company you’re working with, it’s a software solution to be a agency that does your web development. All paramount pieces of the pie to make sure things are working properly. You also may tap in industry experts and analysts to make sure that you’re following the best practices. If you’re not a member, feel like you want to get that third party perspective and then you have your regulatory bodies. So these are people that really set the tone and rules from a legal standpoint on things like accessibility and data privacy laws. So we need to communicate within these these different channels and these people effectively end. Ultimately, what ends up happening is, is we have our internal communication, which may be a platform like Slack teams, Google Chat, Zoom. You know, nowadays there’s so many different pieces of software. You have Adobe Commerce, which in this case is going to be our website engine that hosts our host, our website experience. And then you have email and physical letters that you can be served that indicate maybe new compliance or lack of compliance. And in a worst case scenario, and what typically happens is, is that if you go into a company, maybe you’re brand new, maybe you’ve been there for a while, there can be a mess in terms of how people navigate and contribute to what they believe is going to make that website experience the best it possibly can be. So this infographic is designed to be overwhelming for some of you make it home and be something you’ve personally experienced. But for me, if I enter an organization and this is something that I immediately can see that, you know, this person talks to this person or emails this person who then messages this person, and then you get hit with four different emails and three different communication mediums. It’s it’s it can induce anxiety and it can cause and make especially the product teams job a lot more stressful. So let’s talk about what the impact of this is going to be if you continue to foster this type of environment within your organization. First of all, it’s going to delay anything from your releases. So time to market is going to be one of the first thing it’s going to impact because your organization is just not there. You’re going to have decreased product quality is going to ultimately diminish the overall look and feel of your website and ultimately you’re not going to know how to fix it and why? Because your communication channels are out of whack. It is going to reduce your team morale and productivity. This is something that I personally have experienced because it ultimately, you know, if you if you don’t have a pulse on how people communicate, it’s it’s one of the first things that I personally want to go after and understand and challenge and then above all else, you’re compromising your user experience and satisfaction. So we don’t want this. We want to talk about proper ways of working. And so let’s talk about a proper way to look at your communication implementation within your organization. And so we’re going to talk about this concept of an internal and external feedback core with the preface on the fact that we want everyone to be in sync and we want to have those clear communication channels. So we want to look at every department, whether it’s internal or external and you want to kind of put it into its own distinct kind of a circle that indicates that we’re all in this together and we all are going to contribute to the success of the the website to make it the best experience possible. And in order to do that, we need to have those contributions and those contribute need to be funneled in a way that is clear to understand and ultimately lets you take action on those requests or your comments concerns anything that’s going on that people feel like they want to contribute to. We need to navigate it in a way that’s productive. So a lot of you probably have maybe a form or a survey or maybe a experience on your website that allows customers to interact and provide feedback for the website and what and what needs to improve. If you don’t have anything like this, then obviously you’re probably already experiencing pain points and want to know some best practices of what you can do to accommodate that. So we’ll talk about that here in a second. But if it’s a chat box, a contact us form or that form of survey, this is something that is going to influence the overall tone or feeling of the website experience and give you some perspective. And then from there you have internal components within Adobe Commerce, like this site wide analysis tool. So for those of you that use this, this is a really great way to look at the health of your website, to look at any bug patches, extension incompatibilities and just the overall basically like lack of functionality that you maybe are taking advantage of, it can really drive you to hone in on some things that need to be improved on that website. And then you have your analytics. So in this case, when you’re looking at Adobe Analytics, you’re going to see things like customer journey mapping and then your overall usage statistics as your customers are navigating that website. And all of this is going to influence your backlog. So the backlog is going to just give us that clear picture and view of what is it that we need to prioritize and how do we need to go after it to make sure that we’re going after the right things? So in your organization, you should be utilizing some sort of project management software. There’s tons of them out there. But this particular example we’re going to talk about how Adobe work can be beneficial to you to really help streamline everything into one area that is within your backlog within work front. And then from there, the product management team can go right to that directly and not worry about getting hit from other angles that they’re expected to act on and take initiative to improve that experience. So by streamlining everything into one area, it’s really going to help that transparency and ultimately allows the product team to have more basically effective communication with those industry experts, third party service providers, and maybe take action on any sort of compliance issues with that regulatory body. So this is all great. We know that. We want to streamline that. So let’s talk about a practical implementing strategy that you can do both internally and externally within your team. So we have the core concept. We understand it’s important to streamline it. We want to have a dedicated area that we’re going to. So what does that look like? The first thing that we’re going to look at is a demo scenario where we have a company called Eco HomeGoods. Eco. HomeGoods sells sustainable products that are made from materials and items that you would consider eco friendly. And ultimately, their mission is to make sure that they’re providing you your products that you use in your everyday life, but also make you make sure you understand that they are keeping the earth in mind. So the first thing you want to look at is how you create that internal organizational transparency. And one of the things that you can do, whether it’s Adobe Experience Manager, is a landing page or you have SharePoint or maybe a custom webpage within WordPress, no matter what your organization is using internally for communication, you should have some way of spending up some landing page that allows for that transparency. Transparency through a e commerce product development dashboard. And this is not just for your e-commerce applications. It can be for other applications that you have different product managers over. But ultimately, in this scenario, we’re going to talk about a product development dashboard for Adobe Commerce and some of the things that you can add to really give that transparency to your internal team. The first thing is creating a dedicated space for BUG in feature requests and web content changes. So by linking off to a form that allows the user to establish the urgency and give them the ability to provide context behind that issue again. So giving them a defined list of items to fill out, but then funneling that content into a live backlog submission that the organization is able to that internally and then publicly post. So we’re going to talk about what that looks like here in a second. But by having the ability to submit those changes and then provide a dashboard for, say, your release notes, whether it’s monthly or quarterly, based on the kind of iteration timeline that your company has, it’s going to be really important for them to always go back and reference that or an idea of where we’re at with the different changes. And then from there you want to have a priority level classifications. So again, there’s there’s multiple ways in which you can showcase this information, whether it’s during the form being filled out or again prominently on this dashboard page, but really emphasizing that based on the priority level that you are filling out, what is it that you can expect in terms of the turnaround time to really giving them that transparency, showing the team? So again, big organization, this is especially helpful, making sure that you can just put a face to a name and know who is the people within your team that are behind making this product better. This is a really simple ad to showcase to your internal team. And then one of the most important things is finding a way to embed a backlog in your your active backlog of approved embedded items that your team wants to expose and then the items that are currently in development. And then right alongside that, a Sprint timeline or your development timeline to let people know based on things that are in development, the expected release. This can be a big ask depending on your current situation in your organization. But ultimately, if you are able to give your team internally a kind of a pulse on where you’re at with the types of submissions, who submitted them and a general idea of what you’re actually working on, it really helps foster that culture of inclusion and that buy in so that you are effectively communicating to both your internal team so that when they’re having conversations amongst each other, it’s the same messaging. But ultimately your customers, they’re making sure that you’re making sure that they’re hearing feedback, that they’re aware of the items that are being submitted, submitted, and they know what’s going on. So let’s talk about how we can then turn that into best practices for external organizational transparency. So there’s a lot of platforms that offer best in class experiences for feature requests and maybe roadmap view or releases that you’ve done in the past. There’s a few examples here, like Candy Panda or Product Flipboard, but ultimately you want to host some sort of embedded experience on your Adobe Commerce website that gives your users the ability to do a couple of things. First thing, allowing them to see the list of feature requests and see what’s trending, what is the things that have been submitted in the past to help reduce that redundancy, but ultimately give them a dedicated spot where they can submit feedback and give their their kind of take on what’s going on and what they believe to be improved. And by having that submission there or giving them the ability to submit it, that’s going to give them the same exposure once they submit it, to allow other team members to interact interactive things like uploading, going in and commenting on it, creating that engagement. From a product team standpoint, this is absolute gold. This is the thing that allows you to really ensure that you are fostering that inclusion with your customer base and you making sure that the changes that are being made are prioritized correctly. So these are all great and we know that we have communication figured out. So now we want to talk about what is a practical example look like and what is it using that eco home brands company and what is the kind of kind of ideas or thoughts around how you would go after that based on applying these best practices? So when we think about a website, there’s a lot of different components that could be improved. But ultimately in this example, we want to focus on enhancing the product detail pages. So in this case, we know that we want to gain cross-functional insights. So in this example, we have indicated that the sales team has highlighted a bunch of different queries on eco friendliness from their customer base. The customer support team has a bunch of different questions coming up on sustainability certifications, and the development team has noted a bunch of high bounce rates on the product detail pages that don’t have a bunch or that they don’t have as much of this information regarding eco friendliness, sustainability, that sort of thing. And so by using our communication tools and in this case utilizing the product development dashboard for your request transparency using work front for task management, and then creating a prioritized list, focusing on the material transparency and the environmental impact. So that’s ultimately what we want to know, that we know that that’s the issue. That’s how we’re going to hone in on the items that we want to address. Then we have the customer driven enhancements. So by using that customer feedback gathered through the targeted email survey and then that interactive section on the website like we just showed, where it’s going to reveal a strong interest in understanding the environmental impact of their purchases. Basically, customers would like to have more information on how their products contribute to a sustainable lifestyle. And based on this, we’ve we determined that the prioritization for this is there and it’s based off of your website traffic data and the engagement metrics that are indicated on the pages featuring those eco certifications and engaging stories about product origin, environmental impact, etc… So ultimately, we’ve looked at the data and determined that when we see a product page on the left where it’s maybe not as informative. So in this case we have a garden lamp that has stills descriptions and some call outs, but it’s just not as engaging as this product on the right where we have called out more robust descriptions. Talking about proprietary technology that is really fostering the brand mission. We have different certifications that are called out and using iconography like this and global eco environment standards certification and this company’s plant sink technology. So these are things that we found are impactful to the conversion of project purchases through the communication best practices. And we’ve allowed ourselves to effectively know what we need to go after to make our website better. And so now that we’ve understand that communication best practices, we want to go in and talk about how you can then take that and gather the requirements and plan out your initiatives to go in and fix these issues on a website. When you think about all the data that’s inputted coming from customer requests, data that you’re gathering from your analytics tools, anything that you feel that obviously you’ve indicated as a US initiative that knows you know, that you need to go after it and you know that the customers are saying that this is ultimate issue. And then again, that data doesn’t lie. It should ultimately streamline into your backlog. And so once you have reference to that on your back log, you have those list of tasks. We want to make sure that we have someone on the team that can analyze it. So whether it’s a business analyst or someone within your organization that is taking in or taking a look at those requests right as they come in, gathering the requirements, prioritizing the needs, documenting the specifications, and then facilitating that communication to the rest of the team. Now, what this looks like is you have that business analyst or multiple business analysts going in and working with a nominated stakeholder from a different department. So one of the things that is really beneficial is working and fostering a culture that indicates those subject matter experts within each department, someone that really knows, you know, what are those? How do those different software applications work? Again, the subject matter experts in each department is invaluable. And by having them be a part of the product development process, it’s going to really ensure that you’re getting the right voices heard. And these people should be advocates for both the internal team and your external customers. Additionally, you have your customer users, suppliers and partners, and you have these people that you maybe want to nominate or you know of that are really impactful to your actual team and driving that innovation and change for the business. So going in and just creating those kind of nominated or excellent fosters of the brand that are key are going to be key contributors to making sure that those requirements and the documentation that you’re putting together is as effective as it possibly can be from there, whether it’s a product owner or a product manager, someone that is going in and actually honing in on these requirements. Once they’ve been vetted, they should be ultimately reviewing and reviewing and refining it, looking at the backlog and prioritizing it based on the needs that are coming in. And they’re going to work alongside the product manager, which we’ll talk here in a second to really make sure that it is the ultimate need within the organization from their depending on how you’re doing your development process. If you have sprints or different development ceremonies, you want to go ahead and define the goals of that particular sprint or initiative. And then where does it fall in the development schedule that you’ve had lined up? You’re going to continue that collaboration with the team. And so this is going to be a more direct conversation with some of the more technical team members, and then you will go back and reference some stakeholder communication or maybe have some one off conversations with customers. And this is really where you implement your UI UX requirements, your technical scope with your dev and engineering team and then you have other areas of the organization that will ultimately contribute to make sure that this thing can be done and help you prioritize it. And once you have this all vetted by a business analyst, it’s reviewed by product owner and they go in and they prioritize that backlog, we want to make sure that the big picture for that product and its growth as it pertains to business goals and the overall defined product roadmap. Yeah, you want to make sure you’re working with a product manager or again, depending on how your team’s structured, it could just be a collaboration within that organization, whether it’s a product management team, if you have a PMO office or product management office, whatever it looks like, you need to make sure that the ultimate list of tasks, tasks in the backlog is being prioritized and in a way that is basically just fostering the best possible approach for that brand vision. So Product Manager is going to have strategic oversight, cross functional coordination market and customer insight. They’re going to look at performance monitoring and then ultimately help with resource allocation. So a product manager and one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about this role is just really herding cats and making sure people are where they need to be and constantly tapping into all areas of the business to make sure you have a pulse on how do we make sure this product that I oversee is representing not only the brand the best way I possibly can, but ultimately contributing to the success of of growing that product as much as you possibly can. Okay. So understand, I had that technical snafu, so I want to check for time, 37 minutes. Again, this is recorded. So if I’m going to be going through some of these slides faster than I originally anticipated. Yes. Remember that we’re going to have some handouts of resources that will go into this more in depth. And then ultimately this presentation will be shared. So we’re going to go through a couple of these next slides a little bit quicker than I’d imagine. But let’s get into how we can apply a practical example of the requirements gathering using our Eco Home brands company and talking about how we want to improve that product Details Page So versus stakeholder engagement. So your business analyst is going to organize a workshop with the product team, marketing experts and external stakeholders, which will include suppliers and eco certification agencies. Basically want to understand how your customers value eco friendly products. From there you’re going to gather those requirements. So based on your discussions, you’re going to create a business requirements document that captures the essence of what they needed to change and basically include all test technical specifications for displaying certificates, adding an interactive module for customers to maybe see that product lifecycle and journey from raw material to final product. Again, all valuable insights that we gained by fostering, fostering that communication and making sure that all area businesses, business internally and externally are heard from there. You’ve got to create your user stories. So for those of you that are in product management or have navigated user stories and acceptance criteria, they are absolutely critical to structure and order and organize in an effective way. So we’re going to transition from that business requirements document and basically use crafted user stories and clear acceptance criteria to basically understand how customers want to view that product journey and create that transparency from their going to collaborate with your product owner to make sure that all of the user stories are prioritized and lined up into that development sprint so it’s ready to be implemented and ultimately leading to that strategic goal of enhancing customer trust. Through that transparency, through all this, our expected outcome is to have decrease in customer inquiries regarding sustainability and reducing page bounce rates, basically fostering more conversions and basically affirming that effectiveness of the communication communication centric approach. So all of this is saying that you’ve gone through each step in a way that helps ensure that the issue is being resolved in a proper way by using those communication best practices. So you may think that in your organization you have a good pulse on the communication, but it never hurts to re analyze and reassess how things are currently funneling through your business and in a way to working. So we have our testing excellence that we’re going to go through. And then I have some big picture ideas and recommendations around large scale projects. So let’s go ahead and speak to when you get into testing and you want to make sure that you are going at it in the absolute best way possible and following the best practices, you always want to make sure you’re preparing, looking at your exit test, execution, your overall issue, issue management, and then having your final verification and closure. So this is a very high level look at like, okay, how do you make sure testing go successful? But any of us that have done proper QC and testing analysis on different releases understand that we’re constantly iterating it, we’re constantly adapting it to the business needs and ultimately it’s going to, over time, increase your efficiency and make sure that you all have kind of a sync process that you can cater to and drive success. So when we think about implementation testing itself comes to a bunch of core sequence of steps. So I’m going to talk about a practical example, but just know that when we look at these 13 steps here, it goes all the way from that original review of the user stories and acceptance criteria to preparing the testing, making sure your your testing environment is ready to go and then you’re going and executing test cases, making sure that you’re logging in and verifying fixes, looking at the performance and security, updating documentation along the way, and then pulling in and gathering stakeholder feedback as you are going through and looking to go after this particular development. There’s a lot that goes in here and we’ll have a more verbose and a list of what exactly each one of these means and the importance of it. When we see the handouts following the recording in this presentation. But let’s look at a practical example using that eco home goods business and what we did as a business to effectively test the new product detail page changes that we made on our website. So where we review the user stories to understand the enhancements expected user experience regarding, the eco information and the certificate certification being shown, you draft your test cases that specifically address the new eco friendly attributes and customer engagement features on the product pages, and from there looking and doing a check for time. You’re going to go through and set up your testing environment, automate the testing set up and do manual and automate execution. So when you look at getting everything to get ready to do the manual only execution, you’re just going through and making sure that you have all of your previous technical scope, user stories and acceptance criteria laid out in a way that you can take action on them and basically monitor the results of that. And when you get to the point of the execution of releasing this, this development, you are going to make sure that every single boxes checked and every single thing on that development is being considered following the sequence of events. So again, I’m going to lean more towards anyone that’s on this call to reference this so you can take in the content. But I want to be inclusive of time and make sure that I get to the last couple points. And then if any of you that are on the call can say maybe 5 minutes passed, we can get through some of your questions. So again, apologies. I have to wrap through these particular slides, but the data is there and you guys can reference them after the fact. But one of the biggest things that I’m really passionate about speaking about today is taking all of this in unifying your procedures and managing those dual scale project streams when you have ongoing maintenance and regular budget feature releases and you have big picture implementations going on, whether it’s a complete website redesign or in this case, we’re going to talk about an Adobe Commerce engine upgrade. You have to make sure that you have different processes, you’re have your structure in place. So when it comes to that organization, dual project or dual scale project streams, you need to navigate and understand prioritization clearly to make sure that your resources are allocated effectively without overburdening the team. Your communication strategies need to be distinct and transparent, making sure that you are clear with your updates and any sort of feedback loops that are happening. Stakeholder engagement is going to make sure that your requirements and expectations are met with the appropriate urgency. Your risk management is going to make sure that you’re tailoring your mitigation strategies in addressing the unique challenges of each, and that is something that you’re going to continue to do every step of the way as you’re going after your different small and large scale implementations. And then with change management, you’re basically adopting a more structured approach for large scale initiatives like an Adobe Commerce engine upgrade and Agile change management for your small scale projects. So again, there’s a lot that goes into this, but having this as kind of like your high level and then looking at how do you navigate your regular sprint releases and your your big picture items. So with regular Sprint releases, you are going to always want to define to prioritize your bug fixes and any new features that are coming up for any upcoming sprints. This is always going to be based off of the feedback, business priorities and product roadmap. Like you talked about earlier, You’re going to look at your development and allocate your teams to work on dedicated areas. So if you have a dedicated sprint team, that’s going to be one thing. And if you don’t have the resources for that, you’re going to adapt and split off of resourcing the best, the best you possibly can based on the needs of the business, continuous testing and integration. This kind of goes without saying, but with Agile methodology and anything that you’re introducing regarding product driven growth, you’re always going to want to make sure you’re continuously testing and deploying your small scale changes and maintaining a steady flow for your improvements and fixes. Stakeholder updates we talked about earlier how they’re constantly being engaged with, but you need to regularly inform your stakeholders with Sprint reviews and demos of anything that you’re looking to announce or release, and then basically allowing them to see that progress and provide feedback along the way and and then finally release readiness, making sure that it passes all testing and it’s ready to go before you deploy your production environment. So and then it says, okay, let’s go ahead and keep going. Was making sure we had time for the Q&A. All right. So large scale implementations, this is the one that can get really tricky when you’re trying to take our Adobe Commerce engine upgrade and implement it alongside any feature enhancements that, you know, you want to do as business. It can be really impactful to your overall workflow if you don’t know how to mitigate them both at the same time. So one of the things you can do to increase that effectiveness is establish a project kick call. So basically making sure that you’re defining scope with the project team members, the objectives milestones and then basically securing that buy in from all of those people that are going to be a part of that project. You’re going to go ahead and do an upgrade team formation. So form a separate project team with member specialize in system upgrade. So ensuring that they’re not a part of the regular sprint really cycles to avoid the resourcing conflicts. This is something that I know can be depending on if you’re a small or large team. This can be one of the most challenging things to adopt and understand. But this is where with the cohesiveness of understanding your backlog and the prioritization, you have to make the call. If this is upgrade, that has to happen because there’s going to be incompatibilities, important security patches that need to be applied and Adobe upgrades their website engines to make sure that you have the best in class website engine available to you. And if you are not able to prioritize your upgrade alongside your regular releases or just look at this as something that you can as an area of opportunity, but also something that helps you understand that maybe there is a case in the communication chain or there’s something that you guys can do as a business to not let an upgrade set you back, or if it’s a website adjustment like a product detail page. These I’m sorry, are probably detail page width and maybe a product catalog restructuring. Anything that seems like critically like, you know, halt everything that you guys have to work on and you don’t ultimately feel like you have the resources to do it. You need to take a step back and analyze where those roadblocks are coming in next to me. Phased approach. So breaking the upgrade process into phases and allowing for that focused attention on each stage with specific goals such as the initial setup data migration, and then all of your functionality testing, separating it out is huge and will really help make sure that you’re working on defined areas properly. And then with the engine upgrade, there’s also going to be a risk and change management, just like Sprint regular Sprint releases. So implementing a robust risk management plan and change control process to handle these complexities of the upgrade and not impact the ongoing sprint activities that are happening onsite. And then again, communication and documentation, maintaining clear documentation and documentation and communication channels for the update project and track those progress and decisions being made throughout the way. And when you when you have those two separate workflows for how you’re going to navigate small and then the large scale implementations, then you can go in and talk about how you can effectively synchronize both tracks. So if you want to maintain that collaboration and have cohesiveness, you want to have dual track leadership. So assigning a dual track manager or someone to oversee the the alignment and balance between the sprint cycles in the upgrade project is critical and can really help remove any ambiguity as each team is working. Resource allocation and scheduling is then going to allow you to understand what are the critical tasks and allocate those resources in a way that you can still accomplish sprint work and then do the upgrade tasks on the side and they don’t overlap when they need to and make sure that people are aren’t under-resourced. From there you’re going to have inter track communication, so you’re going to have regular inter track meetings to discuss dependencies, conflicts and resource sharing agreements to make sure that you are always on top of what’s going on and maybe any adjustments that you need to make based on the occurrence date of the business and what’s going on. We all know things can come up and it can ultimately derail anything that’s going on in the organization. And so by having those regular intra track meetings, it can be really to continue to prioritize the work. So reevaluate your priorities when necessary, determine if the sprint items can be deferred or if additional resources are needed for the upgrade. So maybe you have all internal development and need to hire an external agency to help just do the upgrades. This is something that’s very common and it’s something that can really help you utilize some of the certified agencies that Adobe has to take on one specific task with your organization and not derail any ongoing feature enhancements you want to do. And then lastly, the feedback loop and adjustments. So again, getting feedback from both sides to make informed adjustments, ensuring continuous improvement and basically making sure that you have a parallel project streams and are not impacted. So a lot to take in here. But when you think about all of the nuances that come with a large scale upgrade, there’s one thing that I found that was one of the most helpful and effective ways to navigate in an upgrade. Once you’ve gone through and defined the areas that need to be developed and you’ve created your user stories acceptance criteria, any technical scope that needs to be navigated with integration enhancements, everything that comes with an upgrade is all critical, but also needs to be tracked appropriately. So the final thing that I want to talk about today is understanding the importance of a traceability matrix during an upgrade. Some of you may have used these, but ultimately when you think about everything that goes into a big implementation, there’s a lot of different defined areas of requirements and expected outcomes based on the thing that you’re testing. So by having a traceability matrix to navigate during an upgrade, it’s going to basically serve as a central repository for all of your requirements, all your test cases, development tasks, and allow the product managers or project managers to have a complete organization over all the different sections, whether it be front end or back end again, integrated integration improvements, and then have a comprehensive view that you can then take action on immediately. If there’s an issue, if there is a bug, you can then create a ticket directly from there or an issue within your project management software to go in and fix that with your development team. It is invaluable to have this type of structure for your big picture implementations because the accountability is there and it leaves no room for ambiguity. And then as a team, you can continue to improve these types of traceability matrixes over time and create templates. So the first time you create an upgrade, you’re going to have a template for what you did and then the next upgrade, you’re going to be able to iterate off of that and increase that efficiency. So I think for me that is all that I want to talk about. I just want to apologize again for the delay or the delay there with my Internet. But I am available after this call to facilitate any questions and then anything we don’t get to today. And I will do that and make sure that we send some sort of communication out. But Connor, I’m going to hand it back to you and let you pulls it off the Q&A. Absolutely. Tyler, thank you so much. I think one of our Adobe employees said in the chat after today’s experience, you know, we’re doing it live. There was no semi live recording and when you do it live, sometimes things happen. So thank you to everyone for bearing with us that. But Tyler we do have a few great questions coming in from customers. One of the first ones, if I’m looking to implement Agile software development lifecycle practices at my company, what does that first step look like to implementing the strategy? How would you recommend getting that stakeholder buy in to adopt these practices? Good question. So Plan Simple is taking the time to go through your organization and understand what some of the strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats are that they consider within their department. So again, we all work in our own silos within different product teams. So getting some sort of perspective from each area isn’t business first. So once you get some sort of perspective in terms of what they’re looking for out of the product that use that baseline, you’re going to go back to your team and then figure out how we can foster more inclusion. You know, if they’re not getting the communication that they want, where is the stop gap? Do you have a streamlined way for them to submit requests? Do you have a dedicated space that gives that transparency of what is you’re working on? So when you think about just starting from scratch, it’s really just starting from the very beginning and understanding what does each department need and that can start from working with the department head and then help have them nominate someone for you to then work, work through some more in-depth challenges. That’s maybe a subject matter expert, but really kind of going through the chain of command and getting your perspective rooted in data from that team. Oh, I’m going to go. Yeah, I can repeat any of that if you need me to repeat any of it. I know you get it. We got we got most of it. There is just slight static. Okay. Hopefully it’s better now. Yeah, definitely better. The second question we have is when, you know, when having these practices at your company, how do you balance that vision between your key stakeholders? Right. Different boards, maybe differing opinions, and especially when you bring in consultants. But what what is what are some of your best practices for for balancing those different perspectives. Making sure that at the end of the day, everyone has the understanding of what the business intentions are. So we always talk about how product roadmaps are important. You know, we have maybe mission statements within the company that speak to the values of what they’re trying to go after. But when you’re trying to balance communication between all those different ways, you know, if you are working with an actual agency, if you are working with different people within the company, you always want to kind of go back and look at what is the ultimate goal of of the business. And if the goal is an initiative that’s centered around the website experience or something that the website can do, then really honing in and making sure that every decision that’s being made and analyzed is keeping those core values in mind, but also keeping the trajectory of where you’re looking to go in mind as well. Because then when we start looking at the implementation piece of it, as things are getting evolved and changing, there should be no issues with the way people are seeing the enhancements of the website and everyone should be fully bought in and understand the why. So again, by introducing that transparency across the company and then keeping the core values in mind of what the ultimate goal is for the brand, you typically are never going to run into issues. You won’t run into issues because you can always route back to that as your why behind what you’re doing. Awesome. Thank you. We have we got about a minute left, but we’ve got time for one more question here that just came in. What have been some challenges that you’ve experienced in implementing Agile practices for your Adobe Commerce implementation? Yeah, so plain and simple, making sure that everyone understands what the kind of the business objectives are. And then for me specifically streamlining communication so that there’s no redundancy in work. So when you have a bunch of different moving pieces between navigating a conversation with different departments, when you have the internal team, like if you worked in the IT department or if you’re part of the product management team, you have all these different moving pieces that everyone is trying to prioritize or go after. So when it comes to just the biggest challenges, it’s just making sure that there’s no ambiguity around what it is that you’re looking to accomplish. And if there is a stop gap in the way that you’re communicating, if there’s a stop gap in the way that people are understanding what you’re doing and why, then these are things that you can easily address and restructure based on whatever feedback you’re hearing. So for me, feedback is obviously crucial. But when you think about feedback within your team, there’s this concept of fearless feedback. You’re not being afraid to challenge the status quo of what it is that we’re looking to fix or change, and never always looking at things from with business intentions in mind and just making sure that people feel heard. So that’s that’s the biggest thing that I can I can say. And we did. I know I said last question, but where we could go a couple more minutes. So Raymond has a question around. Do you have any recommendations around automated testing for e commerce and specifically Adobe Commerce? Yeah, that one is a loaded question where I would have to look at the more specific details. But in general, I mean, it testing should be centered around the things that, you know, you can have regular that that there’s consistency in it. So if you know that you want your website to adapt and accommodate different things on a regular basis, you create your automated tests, you create your automated testing scripts based off those things that you know you can confidently address and have your website look for and adjust. So in this example that I gave with the Eco Home Goods store, we know that we are going to make significant changes around how this product detail pages are displaying content centering around, you know, showing how the product goes from a raw material to being the product to showing the certifications and just informing the on that eco friendliness and the sustainability. And so by doing that, I now know that going forward, every single product that gets introduced to the website is going to have to have certain fundamentals established in there. And so basically you can, you can automate those aspects of it, but like when it comes to tools and implementation of that, those are very case specific and based on your specific needs. That’s where we want to go into the weeds and look at that. So there’s a lot to be had there. You can dive into it. And then we have one that came in through our attendee chat from right. It would be a feasible goal for most even large scale projects to set up in the future for a quick upgrade. Many sprint that do not overlap with any feature sprints. So it looks like sort of a best practice question about maybe separating out some of your larger scale projects. Yeah. To understanding correctly, is it possible to go in and do like a a smaller is it saying a smaller sprint for like a big change or can you rephrase that again, trying to understand if they just need to stop their regular feature enhancements. I think that’s that is the root of the question. Does it make sense? Got it. The stop feature enhancements but but have a quick sprint for a larger project. I mean yeah it absolutely can. Again, when you look at your your your business goals and visions for the year, you’re always going to have different objectives that you want to accomplish either quarterly or within the fiscal year. So if you made a determination as a team that you can you have the ability to sideline some of these regular feature requests and you want to go after an initiative internally, that’s a big picture, certainly. But also those are times where you really need to go in and source and understand if you don’t have the resourcing is just something that is a one off. And would it be more appropriate to go in and hire an agency externally that just go in and tackle that change? Because even though you may be having an agency for the first time for that particular change, you are going to learn from it and understand, okay, well, maybe when that comes up again, we can accommodate it ourselves or it’s going to be even quicker to work with the third party. Because remember, you’re always learning and evolving as you’re accommodating these changes. And the first time you do a specific change, that’s going to be your your framework to work off of. So through time, you should be able to iterate and continue to enhance, whether it’s a small or big picture item within your team’s documentation. Awesome. And and great question for sure. A common one that we see. Well, that that wraps up today’s presentation. Thank you, everyone who attended and who participated in the Q&A. As we mentioned at the top in our follow up email, we will have a recording to this webinar, an option to download the slides. And so as Tyler mentioned, if you want to go back and revisit any of the topics, you will be able to do so on demand. But thank you so much, everyone who attended. Again, thank you to Tyler for sharing your expertise and your knowledge with the broader Adobe Commerce community. We hope you all found this helpful and we will certainly have more learn from your peers events in the future. Thank you all very much. Thanks, everyone. Really appreciate it.