Delivering at Scale: Making Traction with Resistant Partners
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
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Home Depot had four separate supply chains with siloed teams and systems causing fragmented delivery experiences.
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Customer delivery expectations changed drastically after Amazon introduced two-day Prime shipping, pressuring Home Depot to modernize.
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Anar built trust from the ground up by interviewing every individual contributor to understand their perspectives and define success metrics.
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Anar created visual maps consolidating engineering and business contexts to bridge understanding gaps.
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Rachel learned that moving partners from passive avoidance to active resistance reveals their fears and motivations, enabling better influence.
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Persuasion tactics like consistency and consensus helped Rachel get senior leadership engaged and attending UX meetings.
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Translating UX questions into telling statements rather than interrogative questions improved credibility with direct communicators.
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Redefining empathy from problem-based to solution-based helped overcome the 'us vs. them' mindset between UX and supply chain partners.
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Consolidating 10 configurable tools into one holistic supply chain management system improved scalability and user context understanding.
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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."
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