‘Being able to pivot fast has helped N Brown to stay ahead of the curve’

The transition to online has presented an exciting opportunity but also a highly competitive landscape, with digital-first competitors pushing the boundaries of convenience and user experience.

In this fast-moving environment, ensuring that businesses’ internal operations are as streamlined and efficient as possible is more crucial than ever.

I’ve found that the way to overcome these challenges was to build ways of working that are adaptable as well as resilient. In a marketplace where legacy standing can be quickly overtaken by innovative new entrants, the need to be agile in your working practices is essential. These principles drove our adoption of an agile operating model (AOM).

The decision was rooted in the need for greater flexibility and collaboration. Traditional methods, often siloed and slow, could no longer keep up with the rapidly changing landscape. An AOM has allowed us to break down those silos and align our teams around a shared mission.

By creating cross-functional teams that collaborate closely, we’ve been able to address problems in real-time, come up with solutions together, and deliver the best possible customer experience.

We’ve embraced agile working across the entire business, adopting a model of tribes and squads. A squad is a small, cross-functional team (usually between six and 12 people) who work together to deliver value aligned to a product or experience. This is also typically linked to an objective and key results).

“Whether it’s identifying customer trends or streamlining operations, real-time data access has become integral to our ability to innovate and deliver, while making all our colleagues feel involved.”

The members of a squad typically have a range of skills that they use when working collaboratively, with a focus on delivering improved experiences or solving problems for our customers.

A tribe is the next unit up, a collection of squads working together to achieve a shared greater aim or objective aligned to a wider mission and vision that supports our strategy. A tribe can range in size, and at N Brown come under three focus areas—brand, journey and mission—to distinguish the purpose of their deliverable.

One of the hallmarks of an AOM is its focus on placing people at the centre of the process. Engaged colleagues are more productive and more invested in the company’s success. By giving our teams a real sense of agency over the direction of the business, we’ve cultivated an environment where people feel—and are—empowered to innovate, collaborate, and deliver results.

This agile people-centric approach is further enhanced by our ability to harness the full potential of our data. Once confined to specific teams, data is now shared across the organisation, enabling everyone to use it to drive better decision-making.

Whether it’s identifying customer trends or streamlining operations, real-time data access has become integral to our ability to innovate and deliver, while making all our colleagues feel involved.

One of the most striking examples of how an AOM has worked at N Brown is the launch of our new ecommerce platform across our retail brands. This mission involved the simultaneous speeding-up of our delivery times while addressing our run, grow, and transform objectives.

“The ability to pivot quickly and change priorities ensured we addressed the most pressing customer needs there and then”

It was only through the adoption of an AOM that we were able to tackle this immediate business need while meeting our longer-term strategic objectives.

This approach allowed us to make quick go/no go decisions based on real-time feedback, eliminating the need for lengthy approval processes and making us more responsive to market conditions.

In the past, we faced challenges with launching multiple parallel deployments while keeping everything on track. Agile practices helped us overcome these obstacles, bringing the go-live date forward, exceeding expectations, and delivering a scalable platform.

The ability to pivot quickly and change priorities ensured we addressed the most pressing customer needs there and then.

We have been customer-centric by organising around customer journeys rather than projects. We are continuously testing, learning, and evolving based on customer feedback, fostering a culture of innovation where teams are empowered to experiment and adjust quickly using data-driven insights.

While the challenges of the current retail landscape cannot be solved by one change alone, embracing a flexible, agile approach has enabled us to stay ahead of the curve. Prioritising innovation, collaboration, and data-driven decision-making has been key to building a resilient business that can navigate ongoing challenges.

The results we’ve seen demonstrate that agility, when embraced across the organisation, can be a powerful tool for building long-term sustainability and resilience in an increasingly complex market.