From 2010 through 2020, I was part of macys.com’s lean lab ecosystem, known as Macy’s Labs.
A bit of timeline…
In 2013, company CTO Yasir Anwar introduced the concept of Idea Labs, small lean interdisciplinary groups tasked with implementing a forward-looking feature idea. Where did the ideas come from? A quarterly pitch contest in which anyone could submit a concept online with text, images, and video, manage discussion around the idea, and garner votes. The highest voted ideas were chosen for executive pitches. Of the 2 or 3 front-runners, the winning pitch was granted an ‘Idea Lab’, a small interdisciplinary team tasked with implementing some form of the winning concept within 2 weeks.
Getting assigned to an Idea Lab was a plum assignment: hectic and stressful, yes, but also open to all possibilities and novel approaches. In time, proven ideas could — and did — make their way into products and business processes.
After participating in three Idea Labs, I had the opportunity to join a Lean Lab dedicated to tablets on the web as a front-end developer.
After a year and a half, the lab transitioned to improving the web for mobile experience.
A year after that, given the Lab’s previous successes, we were granted an overall charter of Web Innovation, with the freedom to choose areas of investigation of our own.
In 2018, I was given the opportunity to manage this very same Lab. From 2018 to the lab’s dissolution in 2020, we ran numerous experiments, had great successes, and some crushing defeats. What we were able to learn from both was invaluable — but let’s be clear, however invaluable, we found ways to declare value!
Over that time, I had the benefit of some incredible examples both of team leadership and of technical prowess and inventiveness. To say that I struggled to keep up would be an understatement. Yet looking back, I feel tremendous pride in what we were able to accomplish together for the company and our customers.
Also, I kept copious notes about what worked and what didn’t. I became obsessed with what I called the ‘schema’ of the lab: it’s tenants, rituals, cadences, and artifacts. These were equally as interesting to me as anything we were building. One will recognize agile principles, lean principles, as well as known tenants of A/B testing. It’s important to state this clearly: I don’t claim any new territory or innovation here. Nor did we operate as purists within any ideological project framework. Expect some dilution, renamed praxis, and, depending on your background kind reader, outright heresy.
With the lab years now in my rear-view mirror, I wanted to take the time to document this schema. It feels like something of value to me, and mostly I’m doing this for myself. But perhaps someone out there is attempting something similar, and could benefit. Or perhaps someone has had greater success at this, and I can learn even more. Either way, revisiting this material is something I’ve looked forward to doing for a while, so here goes.
I’ll be talking very generically about the work, so don’t expect any deep-diving into the company’s business, which is not really appropriate or helpful here. Instead, I want to frame the overall concepts of how the work was attempted. I’ll talk more about the roles and processes than the actual features themselves. There will be plenty of opinions and soapbox zoom-outs, too, and I’ll try to call those out.
If I had to start naming all the folks who were prime movers in the labs, I’d run out of space quickly.* * Not to mention all of the incredible colleagues I worked side-by-side with throughout that time. But I’ll mention a few leaders who I feel especially drove overall adoption and success of these concepts — Karl Varsanyi, Ryan Takeda, and Farhan Jafri — along with two lab managers who were wonderful templates of lab leadership in action for me to follow — Srinivas Ramakrishnan and Brian Reed. Featured image: “Experiments with Long exposure and lights-015” by Tea, two sugars is licensed under CC BY 2.0