How Sephora Teams Came Together to Create an Agile Task Force

At the heart of what we do at Sephora lives a desire to deliver best-in-class experiences for our client, be it shopping on our app, an enjoyable journey through one of our stores, or personalized recommendations based on products they love.

With so many initiatives in the queue to serve our clients, we need an organized, efficient process to turn these ideas into realities. That’s where our newest task force comes in: the Sephora Stat Sig team! This dedicated group of strategists, data scientists, analysts, information technologists, developers, creatives, marketers, and product managers come together to do what we do best — but faster.

“It’s a progressive way of working,” said Sabrina Keller, Senior Manager, Personalization & Optimization and activation lead. “Not many retailers are doing this.”

This agile process, Scrum, allows us to be nimbler and rapidly test and measure while maintaining accuracy and quality. It brings people from across the organization together to ideate, test, analyze, and relentlessly ask the “what-ifs?” to take personalization and media to the next level.

Central to Scrum is a sprint, in which the Stat Sig team performs a “stand-up” where ideas are created, then tested, analyzed, and rolled out. All of this happens in the War Room, an area on the second floor of 425 Market Street that has been transformed into a workspace with charts, calendars, to-do lists, and a lot of post-its. It serves as the single point of coordination for all the Stat Sig team’s Scrum activities.

It wouldn’t be Sephora without a little flair, though — daily progress on CRM and media initiatives are tracked by a team of racing unicorns!

Multiple teams are represented in the War Room, which is extremely important to ensure a holistic view of each pilot the team works on across different channels. Emmanuelle Paput, Director, CRM Strategy, serves as the Agile lead and oversees all the agile processes across the different teams. She bridges the communication between the activation leads, who each are responsible for initiating a pilot within their own respective channels.

“It’s a really magical way of working because it’s helped us to pass barriers and move faster in a friendly environment,” Emmanuelle said. “We all talk different languages, but Scrum allows us to work in the same process, which provides a real synergy across all different people and skill sets.”

Some goals the team has been working on in 2018 is accelerating the way we deliver messaging and experiences that are responsive to client needs and behaviors, and maximizing our paid media by finding efficiencies that can be redirected to the most impactful opportunities.

Above all, Scrum is showing how our teams live our values every day: initiative is key because they are ideating and working on something that has never been done before; expertise is called upon because multiple teams are contributing something that falls in their specific realm of functional expertise; and of course, teamwork.

“Previous to Scrum, each of the channels within paid media were living in silos,” said Jennifer Nguyen, Paid Media Manager and activation lead. “One of the great things coming out of this is the insight and teamwork among non-paid media channels.”

“We work as #oneteam,” said Andrea Zaretsky, SVP, Loyalty, CRM, and Analytics. “We celebrate each other’s functional expertise and contributions to the mission, and above all, we strive to innovate every day to delight our clients by serving up personalized and relevant value.”