Las Vegas 2022

TJX: Beyond DevOps: The IT Transformation Puzzle at Scale

This is the story of TJX's IT Transformation and our learnings. TJX is a Fortune 100 global retailer (9 countries, 5 e-comm sites and 4500+ stores) that went through a drastic transformation to completely change how we deliver technology to our global business by applying product, agile, DevOps and engineering principles, techniques and mindsets at scale.

VG

Vivek Gupta

Vice President, Engineering, TJX

Transcript

00:00:17

Uh, I'm so pleased that the next speaker is presenting. Vivek Gupta is the VP of Merchandising technology at T G X. So you may not know T G X by name, but their brands include TJ Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, home Sense, Sierra in the United States, Marshalls winners in Canada. Uh, there are over, uh, they operate over 4,500 discount stores. Uh, they are number 75 in the 2022 Fortune 500 list. Um, and I had my first interaction with Vek years ago, and he hinted at something very amazing happening within the T G X organization. And so I'm so pleased that he's able to present, um, especially as T G X has a reputation about being quiet about what they do. Here's vek.

00:00:59

I,

00:01:10

Thanks Jean. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be back here in person. Uh, let me just start off by thanking the programming committee and it volution for giving me this, uh, opportunity. Uh, I have looked at this stage many times in previous years for inspiration and validation, so thanks to many of the speakers who've come before me. Thanks to this community. I know a lot of you have interacted with me over LinkedIn, so unbeknownst to you, you have been part of my journey that have come walk you through. And then I'm also gonna mention that I'm humbled to be representing the work of, uh, our technology org. Uh, this, as you will see, took a lot, uh, of leaders and my colleagues, uh, leading the efforts. Uh, again, I'm very humbled. So let's kick this off by starting you, give you a quick overview of who we are.

00:01:56

Uh, like Jean, uh, mentioned. We are the leading off price apparel and, uh, home fashions retailer in the US and worldwide. We have many brands in us. We have, uh, TJ Maxx, Marshall's, home Goods, home Sense, Sierra Stores in Canada. We have winners and Marshall's and home in, uh, Australia. We have Tkm Max in, uh, UK and Ireland. We have Home Sense stores. And then, uh, then UK, Ireland, Poland, uh, Netherlands, Austria and Germany. We have TK Max stores, uh, 4,700 stores, nine countries, uh, approximately 340,000 associates. Uh, we are ran 75th, uh, on Fortune 500. Uh, we have five e-commerce properties as well. So you can go out and shop at, uh, tj max.com, marshalls.com, homegoods.com, sierra.com, in the us and we have tkm max.com, uh, in, uh, uk. If you have shopped our stores, we do some amazing work. Uh, amazing customer experience, amazing treasure hunting, great merchandise, exciting prices.

00:03:04

So how do we do it? Uh, we have real brands. We don't do promotional pricing. We have some fantastic, uh, merchandise, amazing prices every single day. Uh, we are very smart shoppers or buyers are opportunistic, entrepreneurial. They buy all over the world, uh, and we have never the same selection. Twice. You walk into a stores, you'll find something new. Uh, we have multiple trucks, uh, landing at our stores within a week. Sometimes our store, uh, managers don't know what's in the truck till they open their truck. Uh, and there's no one way we buy. We, we probably leverage all, uh, all different kind of, uh, buying methods. We buy cancellations, we buy closeouts. We have stuff manufactured for us. We design stuff for us. Uh, and we operate our stores, uh, at amazing flexibility. We don't have walls between categories. Uh, so we actually flex and, uh, our categories within the store based on customer demand.

00:04:01

We have a no-frills approach, and we pass all that savings to our customers. Uh, I'll tell you that I've been in, uh, retail for better hours, 20 plus years, uh, concerted and work for very large retailers. The way we do things at T J X, the flexibility of the model, the agility of the model just blows my mind. And then, personally, from a household perspective, we are all maxa. I'm pretty sure there's some of you out there. Uh, and so quickly, uh, about T J X, it, who we are. So we, you heard about all that from a business perspective, from an IT perspective, we are a global function. We support all of that. Uh, we support 1800 plus business solutions that supports our business and enables our business, uh, with all those typical capabilities that you'll find at a retailer. And then we support our business in growth endeavors, like, uh, opening potential new markets, banners, channels, uh, and many large initiatives.

00:04:58

So we do have a very, uh, robust industry leading because we are the leading off price retailer. Our business models very unique, so we have to support that, a very leading ecosystem of technology solutions that have grown with the company and supported them through incredible growth the last four decades. Uh, however, in 2016, uh, we realized that, uh, we we needed to continue accelerating our technology journey and to keep pace with the anticipated growth that business was seeing. Uh, as a result, what I'll talk to you about is we embarked on this incredible journey, uh, that we could send evolve it. And this was the initiative to modernize the way we do it. And, uh, and I, and I like that term, evolve it because we evolution or evolutionary adaptions pro adaptation is probably the oldest continuous improvement process. And that's what we wanted this journey to look like. That, uh, continuous improvement mindset and approach to change.

00:05:56

Uh, so how do we go about it? What was the scope? So we came up with these puzzle pieces and, uh, obviously, uh, DevOps conference. I'll start with DevOps, but, uh, as you can see, that was not the first piece of the puzzle. Uh, I had great experience with, uh, DevOps coming off Nordstrom, as you've already heard, uh, in these conferences from Courtney. And, uh, definitely wanted to start there. But what we realized that we had other pieces of the puzzle missing. Uh, the very first one, we were still doing projects. And so how do you do DevOps of longstanding product teams and ownership if you are still doing projects? So for that and other reasons, the first piece of the puzzle for us was moving to a product team mindset and a con an organization. And once we did that, uh, there was an immediate impedance mismatch with product teams and waterfall.

00:06:45

So obviously the next piece of the puzzle became in agile transformation, because we're still doing projects the waterfall way. And now that we have product and agile and we had to deliver every two weeks, uh, there wasn't, uh, uh, we couldn't be releasing every three months, uh, or weeks. We couldn't be triaging for days and weeks when we do the releases in the waterfall model. So now the automation and the operational mindset and operational excellence, all that fit into piece and DevOps became the third piece of the puzzle. And then we looked at all of this and said, we need a platform, uh, probably that has, uh, flexibility in it, agility in it. There has to be innovation in it. So as a, as a fourth piece of the puzzle, cloud became, uh, the, uh, strategic, strategic piece. We already in cloud, to be honest, we had a lot of SaaS solution, but this was more about how do we strategically adopt cloud as part of the strategy.

00:07:41

And then we looked at this lot of change, and some of us had gone through this change. Uh, obviously we realized that this was going to need a lot of change in mindset, change in approach, change in how we do things, talent, uh, basically a culture, right? A cultural change. And we call that engineering culture. And that became the foundation for all these, uh, different change initiatives. So in theory, we had our framework, all of our tracks, and if we did all this, we would realize the value proposition that we had come up, uh, come up with for the, for the organization. So how did we approach it? Uh, we, we had a very, I'll talk about the top down, bottom up and middle out approach we had that, uh, true to T J X culture. We have, uh, we focused on our, we have a key focus on our associates.

00:08:31

Our employees are called associates internally, and we empowered them and brought them along for the change because this was, this was very large. So the way we thought about it is, was that we definitely needed top-down support. And, uh, uh, our C T O, Andy Sanfilippo, a huge champion of this, uh, our strategy, SS V p, Brian Rodricks, he owned and sponsored it. Our C I o got brought up, uh, brought into this. He, he took it all the way to the board. We still report our progress to them. And, and this kind of executive support was really necessary because we knew we were gonna go against longstanding structures, processes, things, uh, that had to, uh, require that kind of, uh, that level of support. Uh, to be honest, we kicked this off almost five years ago. We had a leadership offsite with, and I invited Gary Grover with some of you may know to speak about, uh, DevOps and the digital transformation.

00:09:28

And we introduced this framework to the, our entire leadership team. The next piece was bottom up, right? So we had, we talked about, I was in one of the Bird of Feathers session, and we talked about radical empowerment. And we literally, at the, from a ground up level, we made sure the engineers, the product owners, the scrum masters, they, they were part of this change. And they, they were involved in defining the, they, they were help, they helped in refin the why, but they're part of defining the what and the how and owning that change and making that happen. And instead of a frozen middle or the next level of, uh, leadership, we had a very active, uh, uh, middle management, right? Which actually helped us refine most of that vision on what that framework looked like. Uh, help defining the what, help leading the change as work stream leads and implementing it in their own areas.

00:10:20

So we brought everybody along for this, and it had to be done that way. Uh, we had some, I think, uh, I'll do many shoutouts during this. Uh, uh, we had our X-factor as our HR partners and change and communication partners, to be honest. They, they were amazing through this. They made sure the overall change was fair and thoughtful. The communication around it was consistent, clear, uh, the change itself was impactful and sticky. Uh, and it took a village. Everyone, everyone and everyone contributed. And, and to be honest, there isn't this rebel and empire story. Uh, I think all of us were a little bit of a rebel at heart to, uh, improve the things around us. Our C I o Mark bio is a great, uh, fan of Star Wars in any case. Uh, so this was our approach. And I, I can say this was beautifully laid out.

00:11:11

Five years ago, we had this picture, but I'll, I'll be lying, right? This kind of, uh, organically happened, uh, and at some point we reflected on it and made sure this became like a framework on how we do it. Uh, so again, great vision. Uh, but like Edison said, uh, vision without execution is hallucination. So how did we do it? So I'll walk you through each, but the progress we have made and some of the key learnings for each of those puzzle pieces, uh, fair warning, each one of those pages and slides could be a talk in themselves. So I've tried to stay very high level, uh, sorry to do with product teams. So, uh, at this moment, our entire IT organization is now organized as longstanding product teams. Uh, we have, uh, platform teams as well, which are organized as product teams. Uh, we have redefined our traditional job families and expectations as part of that product teams, the three legged stool, product management, job, families, delivery, job families.

00:12:06

We have, uh, engineering job families that we, uh, reorganize that we'll talk about. We had to reset expectations around competencies and expectations and things like that. Uh, the big piece, uh, budgeting, budgeting has now allocation has evolved to funding longstanding product teams. Uh, so, and it's flex based on business priorities, but we do have these longstanding product teams that are assured funding every year. Uh, and most importantly, we engage our business partners with shared ownership and stewardship of the products. So quickly, key learnings in this. We, we had long discussions around how do we align the product teams. We landed on business capabilities, not value streams. Value streams, our silos within business units. Business capabilities goes across business units. Uh, the second piece, organizational dynamics and talent was the hardest part of this change. Uh, radical empowerment. I'll give you a quick story. Uh, we, we did, uh, I did a small reorg last last year trying to align to product teams.

00:13:08

And what we did was work with the leaders to lay the f the vision for that and what the new product teams would be. But instead of going in a room and moving people around, we went back to the teams and asked them to self-select where they would want to land. And we honored every request. We have 50 people change managers. Uh, one of the smoothest arc changes I've ever done. They, they stepped up. They owned the change. They not just the org side, they reorg the reconfigured, the scrum teams, the art, the PI cadence. Uh, our associate engagement went up after the reorg, and we didn't drop any of those business deliveries and milestones. So that, uh, radical empowerment in action. And then budgeting continues to be a challenge. Uh, it's still, we are a public trade company. We have to, uh, basically we have obligations, uh, around financial reporting, things like CapEx and opex and other things.

00:14:02

We have a great ID finance team that helped us figure it out and balance the two. We still meet all of our obligations, obviously, but still do that longstanding, uh, uh, product teams agile. So I'll be quick. Uh, the clock is real. Hello, Ms. Min, uh, agile. So, uh, our entire value delivery is organized as agile teams. The scaled Agile framework has been adopted across it. So this is across no exceptions anywhere. Uh, and we are delivering value to business to the cadence they want. Uh, sometime it's two weeks, sometime it's sooner, uh, but it's aligned to what, uh, they want. And then very high level key learnings. Don't just go through the motions, right? Uh, focus on the outcomes both for agile, uh, implementation as well as safe. Uh, we needed layer of coordination. There were things like Brexit and landing, uh, uh, landing a new e-commerce site and channels, right?

00:14:53

That needs coordination across product teams. And I think safe helped with that. Uh, more on that later. Uh, you'll need to focus on what doing and being right success is gonna be in the middle of that, especially since you are moving from the old ways to the new ways. The way I define doing is check. We are doing a daily standup versus being, you're actually, did you need to do the daily standup? Did you get the output of the, and outcomes you intended from the daily standup? So DevOps, uh, from a progress perspective, we have established enterprise DevOps platform teams. Uh, we have an internal model of platform teams. We use three Es engineering, the pro the platform, uh, enabling the, uh, product teams and developers to onboard onto that platform, preferably through self-service. And that evangelizing, basically talking about the benefits of the platform, owning training certification, talking internal coops about that.

00:15:43

And then the other thing we did is balancing and we learned is balancing standardization across the enterprise versus empowerment and choice. The example is we have a fast lane product that's a set of standard tools that everybody can quickly onboard into. We have set standard tools for key capabilities like version control and static analysis. Uh, versus we have different IDs, different development frameworks, d different testing frameworks. So finding the balance between the two, uh, and then implementing telemetry and monitoring, uh, for new and existing application, new applications, easy existing applications. Those 1800 plus was very hard going back and retrofitting everything to the new DevOps standards. And it's still, uh, something in progress. And then learning, starting with the problem, DevOps can be anything and everything as all of us know. So starting with the problem you're trying to solve, and then for each team and then focusing on what you would want to do because you can't do everything, uh, explicitly enabling that feedback from production to development.

00:16:40

Em embedding the wi wisdom of, uh, production into development. So looking at things like F M E analysis and threat modeling and bringing, moving it left, bringing it to the developers as much as you can. And then building shared accountability between dev and ops leaders if you have different leaders doing that cloud. So from a cloud perspective, we have now a cloud first approach. As part of our application strategy, we have established enterprise cloud platform teams similar to the three Es. We have adopted a public cloud platform. And, uh, for cloud native applications, we have established internal platform called vis. Uh, that speeds up onboarding for new product teams and it shows minimum governance for public cloud as we go along. Key learning, uh, uh, there's a lot, uh, making cloud part of your overall application strategy. Don't start with the cloud, start with the application strategy and then define where does cloud fit into that, uh, deliberate strategy for the public cloud adoption.

00:17:38

So that whole ZAVE framework, which had, uh, security and everything built into it, uh, rightsizing the governance for scope and the context and optimizing holistically, considering don't just look at the cloud spend, look at all the values, the opportunity costs, the cost of development and innovation it brings along with it. Evaluate the need for cloud business office. Depending on the scale of your spend and things in the cloud, you may need that. We have that, uh, it helps. Last piece of the puzzle engineering culture. So we scale our engineering talent. We established modern engineering, job families, all the way to distinguished engineers. Uh, we focus in on competencies and learnability. So we had to change the way we hire. We incentivize people and how we train people. Uh, we established community of practice with hundreds of engaged engineers. We have events every quarter. Uh, we have had some great speakers.

00:18:27

We had Dr. Steven Spearer, we had Adam Shattuck, uh, Sami Peters, Helen Beal, uh, and many more. Uh, we have a very shout out to a few folks who have been driving this. Uh, uh, if you follow us on LinkedIn, there's Bala, our principal engineer who's been driving a lot of these. We have senior engineering managers, Al <inaudible>, they support this. And you'll see a lot of it on LinkedIn. And we have improved developer experience. We heard the developers and we've been incrementally improving what they want and how can we give them a frictionless great experience. Uh, we published engineering manifesto, things like engineering manifesto. One I made public as well on LinkedIn. You can look at that. Our C T O recently gave a mandate and manifesto about the right work, the right way internally. And uh, we talk about that a lot. So it's part of our vision and culture and embedded into IT learnings quickly.

00:19:17

Uh, it's a little bit unconventional for enterprise IT to do distinguished engineers or executive level role. There's some education that has to be done internally. We have to change a lot of organizational thinking and pro processes. Uh, psychologically safe environment was critical and I think codifying some of the engineering mindset or culture could be very vague and, uh, vague thing. It could be anything and everything. So making sure you codify some of that with engineering principles, some of that manifesto and mandate and, and, and leaders, and not just like leaders with title, but other leaders play a big role in it. I'm gonna quickly go through some of the key learnings. Clearly communicating vision, explicitly defining that role and organization was a big piece of the transformation. So we had to do a lot of that. Uh, like I said, making intangible, tangible and actionable.

00:20:02

We didn't have maturity models, but we did create some baselines and targets because we did want to make progress and measure progress and things. Uh, I won't drain this. I think I've talked about some of this. I think the key one here is don't outsource accountability. Uh, we had consultants but they didn't own the change. They didn't lead the change. Our leaders, our organization led, led that, uh, empowerment is called out incentivizing the target outcomes. Incentives lead to, uh, uh, uh, behavior leads to culture, and then cost of coordination needs to be balanced by, uh, and outweigh by its benefits. So results, what did we do? We have scale of engineering talent with more ownership of our solutions. Intellectual property. We are releasing value frequently to business. We have reduced overall technical product and focused on product health. We have been able to support our business in their growth endeavors.

00:20:52

We have new set of stores in US Home Sense, if you have seen them. Great stores. We have two new e-commerce properties that came up in the last few years. Uh, marshalls.com and homegoods.com, and then many other things, Brexit and other things, right? As we have been making these changes during the pandemic, because we were already doing this for three, four years, it helped us to react quickly. It helped us to accelerate our digital adoption. I think the biggest thing I would call out is we build this organizational muscle around, uh, continuous change and that mindset of continuous change. And it's more around that evolutionary adaptation. So not change for the sake of change, but evolving to make sure we react to our environment. Help from you. These are all continuing opportunities. Uh, budgeting. Any, any learnings you have, again, any inspirations you have, any validation you have around budgeting overall, continuing maturity, measuring DevOps, uh, the DORA metrics, the flow metrics, the ThoughtWorks metrics.

00:21:44

There've been too many metrics. How do you baseline one and track it year over year? Uh, and then balancing speed to market with efficiencies, that's an ever going, uh, challenge within the organization. Because we are a large organization for some business units, it's about speed. For some business units, it's about efficiency and it's also at point in time. So many of these decisions depend on that. So that's all I had. I will do a shameless plug, uh, process and tools and nothing without people. All this required a lot of talent and we are hiring. If you wanna work for a great company, great culture. We, part of the exciting work that we are doing, uh, uh, please come and join us. We have offices near Boston, London, Toronto, and we have a very flexible working arrangement as well. Thank you.