To stay competitive in this market, you can’t just meet customers’ expectations. You need to exceed them. Adidas is already offering more than just their shoes. Staff in their stores have apps to analyse running gait and advise on the best trainers. There are NPS machines to gather feedback, and of course, the whole offer is available online via various channels. But to move to the next level, they asked us to work with their Sales and IT teams to develop a systematic approach to putting the customer at the core of everything they do.

We set up a cross-functional transformation team with adidas leaders and agile coaches. Together, we developed an integrated roadmap to bring about the envisioned change one milestone at a time. To validate our tailor-made Agile-CX approach we did a pilot with one product team first. This reduced the risk of failure for the other teams to follow. A big ‘aha-moment’ of the pilot was to map the team’s backlog to the customer journey, making their impact on CX explicit and actionable.

After the pilot, successful Agile-CX activities such as this one were consolidated into training material – we were ready to scale up and introduce it to other teams.

The importance of having everyone on board cannot be overstated when undertaking organisational change on this scale. Delivering training in a number of ways – in groups, via workshops and especially on a one to one basis has ensured that the work can spread between team members, and then between teams. Holding collective training sessions and sharing best practice has been a highly effective way of ensuring the change is understood and adopted by everyone with enthusiasm. Our work with them is still ongoing. As they build their internal capabilities, we learn together how the work can be scaled to move outwards and upwards in the organisation.