Designing in a Pandemic: Integrating Speed and Rigor
Summary
When the pandemic forced necessary lockdowns across the country, Canadians were discouraged from shopping in stores to avoid spreading COVID-19, the challenge of quickly and efficiently pivoting to ensure groceries could reach customers fell to retailers. In this session, Tiffany Cheng reveals how Loblaw, a beloved national retailer in Canada, rapidly shifted its grocery delivery launch plans in response to increased competition and a global pandemic. Learn how Loblaw integrated speed and rigor, and adopted an approach of flexibility, short-term planning, and pivoting workflows to meet rapidly-changing conditions.
Key Insights
-
•
Prioritizing what customers need most during a crisis helps guide which features and fixes to focus on for faster delivery.
-
•
Breaking work into parallel streams allows teams to work concurrently, speeding up overall progress without sacrificing quality.
-
•
Using low-fidelity, untested mockups can be sufficient to start technical development early, enabling faster iteration cycles.
-
•
Vertical slices focus on specific parts of the experience, while horizontal slices provide a general outline before deep dives; combining both can optimize workflows.
-
•
Launching a minimally viable but usable product during urgent situations can better serve customers than waiting for perfect.
-
•
Developers only need a general outline, not pixel-perfect designs, to begin feasibility assessments and coding.
-
•
Organizations can repurpose staff (e.g., office colleagues volunteering for order picking) to meet unexpected demand spikes.
-
•
Competitive pressure (like a rival launching delivery) can force teams to reshuffle and prioritize work for speed gains.
-
•
Managing technical debt during rapid development can be done by breaking fixes into smaller incremental improvements tied to business goals.
-
•
Digital products’ inherent flexibility allows continuous post-launch improvements, making speed-first approaches less risky.
Notable Quotes
"Groceries became the center of the pandemic. You can live without new clothes or movies, but not without food."
"The most important thing to remember is to be flexible in your concept of a deliverable."
"Not every feature change needs a fully interactive prototype or pixel-perfect mock-up."
"Developers just needed a general outline; they didn’t require every detail to start their work."
"Done is better than perfect. You can always refine afterwards."
"People don’t use our products for the sake of using them. It’s to achieve an outcome."
"When push comes to shove, think about the human need. Are they able to do that with an imperfect but usable product?"
"Digital products aren’t like buildings; they can keep changing and moving as you need."
"We applied usability test fixes post-launch to get the service out earlier during lockdown."
"Breaking down debt into smaller slices can enable incremental improvements across upcoming projects."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Teams started shipping multiple new features every few weeks, not because they cut corners, but because of fewer false starts."
Bianca JeffersonFrom Sprints to Systems: Operationalizing Continuous Discovery Through DesignOps
September 10, 2025
"One ops person to five researchers seems pretty legit, according to Kate Towsie."
Brigette MetzlerScaling ResearchOps: Helping Researchers do Their Best Work
March 30, 2020
"I was interested in thinking of this method as a survey plus that you can use to get survey-like data but with more qualitative depth."
Tara TresselInvestigating qualitative depth of AI-moderated interviews
March 10, 2026
"Creativity fuels design, design fuels innovation."
Dr. Karl JeffriesThe Science of Creativity for DesignOps
January 8, 2024
"Edgy is like a Rosetta Stone for enterprises, expressing the same thing in languages designers, strategists, and architects use."
Milan GuentherA Shared Language for Co-Creating Ambitious Endeavours
June 6, 2023
"Efficiency in design and delivery reduces energy use and thus contributes directly to sustainability gains."
Chris HammondEmbedding sustainability into enterprise design and development: A journey towards "sustainability consciousness"
April 2, 2025
"Most teams want to build for 50, 100 people and migrate years of data instead of starting small."
Sofia QuinteroBeyond Tools: The Messy Business of Implementing Research Repositories
March 10, 2022
"Being trauma informed is not a destination but a journey of continuous learning and unlearning."
Uday Gajendar Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Dr. Dawn Emerick Dawn E. Shedrick, LCSWLeading through the long tail of trauma
July 7, 2022
"What if you didn’t know there were important questions you should be asking in your data?"
Ian JohnsonLatent Scope: Finding structure in unstructured data
June 11, 2025
