Case Study: VF Connection Tool
VF Corporation isn’t a household name, the brands of VF are: The North Face, Timberland, Vans, Wrangler, Lee, and more. As part of the Digital Lab at VF, my role was to conceptualize and execute digital projects and leverage my central role to elevate all of the brands of VF toward business goals.
No one, in like roles, was talking across VF
Every brand at VF runs their business independently, staffs as they need, and manages technology to suit their needs. This doesn’t make it easy for a central team to manage, but there are parallels across the brands and similar business problems. One thing I noticed very early on was that people in like roles never spoke to people at the other VF brands. For example, the Timberland email marketing specialist never spoke to the Vans email marketing folks. There was no mechanism for these people to learn from one another.
Connecting expertise across VF
Through the HR system, you could search for a person by name. This is only helpful if you know who you are looking for. I imagined a system where you could search for people by discipline, brand, or other attributes to facilitate conversation and learning. I investigated what what was possible within the HR system and wasn’t happy with the capabilities so I decided to build a POC to create something easy to use, fast, and flexible.
If you build it, they will come
The famous Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” seems applicable. I utilized a jQuery framework called Masonry and manually pulled data from our HR system to cobble together my POC. It was quick to build, but not the easiest to maintain since the data itself lived in the HTML file. But, it was enough to get started and share with the internal team for testing.
Version 1 was an immediate success with our internal teams. They loved the ability to search by brand or discipline. They had a lot of suggestions on how to improve the functionality and the flywheel of build, test, learn, iterate and repeat began in earnest. My each new release I added functionality, improved data, and fine-tuned the process. By version 5 (shown above in the video) there was enough momentum to bring in an engineer and connect with HR to leverage the core people data, rather than continuing to export and reformat that data.
Learning from each other is the goal
Giving people a tool to connect and learn from the institutional knowledge of VF was the goal. This tool provided a starting point and put the power in the hands of those doing to work to ask direct questions with those most able to answer. In any large organization, it’s very easy to get siloed and communication across teams is difficult. This was my attempt to break down some of these barriers and put the power into the hands of the people doing the work.
In the video: You can sort by role (seniority level), by expertise, by brand, and region (not shown). You can also combine these filters. For example (in the video), if you wanted to see all employees from The North Face who work in a marketing role.