Case Study: Vistaprint
Vistaprint is recognized as one of the earliest and most successful examples of agile transformation. Vistaprint had a problem when Jody Gold and Amina Knowlan, the founder of Matrix Leadership, began working with them.
They strove to radically scale product offerings quickly and without increasing staff.
Though they had the strategy, the resources, and the mandate, fear and factionalism kept employees from coming together across traditional organizational boundaries.
No amount of training, reorganization, or goal setting seemed to help people take necessary risks.
Jody and Amina worked with Vistaprint’s most senior agile coaches, those responsible for ensuring that essential teams succeeded in their own agile implementation. These coaches wrote the book (actually, several books) on agile. They’d followed the agile model for a while and were now running into the same people problems that undermine collective understanding, intelligence, and action everywhere.
They conducted a two-day offsite retreat focused on psychological safety, utilizing differences as resources, and feedback to improve relationships and results.
Following our work with them, the coaches said they had become the healthiest team any of them had ever been a part of. “Bulletproof” is how several of them described their team. We learned that agile methodologies help developers get their best ideas to customers faster through early and iterative feedback. In the words of one Vistaprint client, the Matrix Leadership methodology helped teams “take early, incremental, and iterative actions on themselves as a system so they could work together as effectively as possible”. Another said, “the business effect was visible across tens and later hundreds of product launches.”
