Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Delivering at Scale: Making Traction with Resistant Partners

Gold
Thursday, June 9, 2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Share the love for this talk
Delivering at Scale: Making Traction with Resistant Partners
Speakers: Anat Fintzi and Rachel Minnicks
Link:

Summary

In 2017, The Home Depot announced a $1.2 billion supply chain investment with the goal of better meeting the changing needs of both do-it-yourself and professional customers. This commitment, which was originally intended to come to full fruition on a five-year timeline, got an unexpected speed boost in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Home Depot saw an unprecedented increase in the volume of deliveries and a need for expanded deliveries capabilities and flexibility. This growth has not been without pain. Unlocking these capabilities necessitated transitioning away from siloed fulfillment channels to unified technological, operational, and communication experiences. Here, the THD Deliveries UX team saw an opportunity to deliver value at scale: dynamic supply chain configuration. This is the story of how Home Depot scaled their deliveries supply network administration to support an ever more dynamic and transparent deliveries network that serves their business and centers their customers’ and associates’ experiences.

Key Insights

  • Home Depot had four separate supply chains with siloed teams and systems causing fragmented delivery experiences.

  • Customer delivery expectations changed drastically after Amazon introduced two-day Prime shipping, pressuring Home Depot to modernize.

  • Anar built trust from the ground up by interviewing every individual contributor to understand their perspectives and define success metrics.

  • Anar created visual maps consolidating engineering and business contexts to bridge understanding gaps.

  • Rachel learned that moving partners from passive avoidance to active resistance reveals their fears and motivations, enabling better influence.

  • Persuasion tactics like consistency and consensus helped Rachel get senior leadership engaged and attending UX meetings.

  • Translating UX questions into telling statements rather than interrogative questions improved credibility with direct communicators.

  • Redefining empathy from problem-based to solution-based helped overcome the 'us vs. them' mindset between UX and supply chain partners.

  • Consolidating 10 configurable tools into one holistic supply chain management system improved scalability and user context understanding.

  • Cross-silo collaboration is rapidly replacing siloed decision-making, fostering shared information and customer-first priorities.

Notable Quotes

"Home Depot is the sixth largest private company in the US with over 500,000 employees, yet our deliveries experience was embarrassingly bad."

"Two-thirds of our internal team had experienced a late or lost delivery, reflecting real customer frustration."

"When I started, the team didn’t understand what the point of UX on the back end was; I had to win their hearts and minds."

"Engineers didn’t understand why they were building what they were building, and product managers didn’t understand what engineers were building."

"Moving partners from passive to resistant helped reveal their fears and motivations so we could tailor our conversations to them."

"Asking questions made our direct communication partners think I didn’t know what I was talking about; telling statements worked better."

"Empathy isn’t about absorbing everyone’s emotions; it’s about shifting from problem empathy to solution empathy."

"Involving partners means tell me and I forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand."

"We consolidated over ten tools into one supply chain management system with a user-led team of 4 UXers, 2 product managers, and 6 engineers."

"Before, silos ruled. Now, teams share information and make cross-supply chain decisions focused on customers and associates."

Ask the Rosenbot
Harry Brignull
Beyond Clicks and Tricks: Why deceptive design has grown into a regulatory faultline
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Dean Broadley
Not Black Enough to be White
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Cennydd Bowles
Exit Interview #2: Rediscovering the ethical heart of design
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Eduardo Ortiz
Theme 3 Intro
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Theresa Neil
Designing for Wellness: Specializing in Healthcare
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Abbey Smalley
Scaling UX Past the Size of Your Team
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Christian Bason
Innovating With People: Unleashing the Potential of Civic Design
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Michael Polivka
Scaling Design through Relationship Maps
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Anna Poznyakov
Get The Most Out Of Stakeholder Collaboration—and Maximize Your Research Impact
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Sahibzada Mayed
The Politics of Radical Research: A Manifesto
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Lin Nie
When Thought-worlds Collide: Collaborating Between Research and Practice
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Chris Geison
Theme 1 Intro
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Gabriela Barneva
Operationalizing Inclusive Design in Design Ops
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Andrew Webster
Scaling Design Capability: How Involved Should You Be?
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Cassini Nazir
The Dangers of Empathy: Toward More Responsible Design Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Liz Ebengo
The Burden on Children: The Cost of Insufficient Post-Conflict Services and Pathways Forward
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold

More Videos

John Cutler

"Patient opportunism means most of the time having the current at your back and only occasionally angling directly against it to avoid burnout."

John Cutler

Oxbows, Rivers, and Estuaries: How to navigate the currents of change (without burning out)

December 3, 2024

Darian Davis

"A common toxic behavior is glory seeking, like presenting work as your own when it was a team effort."

Darian Davis

Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship

January 8, 2024

Dave Gray

"The tool is designed so you can just sit down, read the questions, and get started even if you don’t have much background knowledge."

Dave Gray

Group Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps

November 7, 2017

John Cutler

"You wanna capture all the mess, but you cannot operate in the mess. Leave a path back to the mess so details and signals remain available."

John Cutler

The Alignment Trap

November 29, 2023

Abby Covert

"Just because you can color code something doesn’t mean you should."

Abby Covert

Stuck? Diagrams Help

October 27, 2022

Mark Interrante

"If you want to get faster output, optimize the work and workflow first — not add more hours."

Mark Interrante

Collaboration Flows in Product Development

June 9, 2017

Devon Powers

"Obsession with gadgetry and cool tech ignores the fact that most critical future changes are mundane and essential, like clean water."

Devon Powers

Imagining Better Futures

March 9, 2022

Prayag Narula

"Design research—they need each other. They are much, much better together."

Prayag Narula

How to Empower Your Designers to Do Good Research – And Why You Want To

June 10, 2022

Peter Van Dijck

"We need to dramatically change the hats, the walls, and the workflow of how we work together in design and development."

Peter Van Dijck

Hands on AI #3: Claude Code for UX people

October 22, 2025