This is an excerpt the first of a series of eBooks detailing how engineering leaders are moving to the Jamstack modern web architecture with the help of Netlify to increase development velocity, and deliver the most performant sites and web applications. The series explores issues including performance optimization, security and how your team can ship faster using Jamstack and Netlify workflows.
The Barriers to Building An Ideal Developer Experience
Enterprises operate at a distinct level of scale, sophistication, and security. In an enterprise environment, you might not be able to adopt every new tool that comes to market, or every API that’s released. Some of those developer tools can’t support the needs of the enterprise.
Netlify thinks a bit differently when it comes to enterprise development. The entirety of the Netlify platform is built with stalwart security and scalable architecture, without compromising the developer experience. The hallmark of the Netlify platform is intuitive developer workflows that enable team collaboration and productivity.
Some of the tools enterprises rely on today might have been intuitive when they were initially released. But, today, they’re not doing that enterprise any favors. One company ran into this issue and decided to try something new.
How Netlify Helped Canada’s Largest Online Retailer 20x Their Productivity
Loblaw is Canada’s largest online retailer with over 25,000 employees and 300 developers. Last year alone, the company posted $48 billion in revenue. The bedrock of their success is customer experience, a lion’s share of which takes place online.
Over 7 million people engage with Loblaw’s digital platforms every single day, while over 85% of Canadians shop at Loblaw stores every week. As a top choice for Canadians looking to buy goods online or in person, Loblaw has to ensure that every aspect of their business is streamlined and scalable, including their website.
Back in 2017, Loblaw was finding difficulty speeding up their time to design, develop, and deploy new sites and products. Their deployment cycle followed an assembly line process in which one team completes their work and then passes the project down to the next stakeholder. (This might sound familiar to some.)
This assembly line style of project management wasn’t working efficiently. Projects commonly sat in one team’s domain until stakeholder feedback was resolved. This delay in getting feedback from stakeholders was slowing down Loblaw’s time to market, potentially causing them to miss out on opportunities to grow customer loyalty.
At first, Loblaw tried to alleviate this problem by hiring more engineers to build products, but this just added more stops along the proverbial assembly line before a product could get to market.
Using Netlify, the Loblaw team was able to drastically increase their development speed and bring more products to market faster.
Before switching to Netlify, Loblaw shipped one new product per year on average. After switching to Netlify, Loblaw’s team of engineers were able to launch 11 products in just four months.
Here are some additional results:
- 92% better site performance
- 26% better accessibility
- 10x faster time to market
- 20x faster product production
- 36k monthly cost savings
By unlocking the power of developer productivity, Loblaw is able to get more products to market faster.
Loblaw realized that developer efficiency isn’t measured by the number of developers working on one particular project or problem, but rather by the impact of the tools, architecture, and workflows they’re using to solve a problem and bring a product to market.
Netlify allows the Loblaw team to avoid lengthy feedback cycles by ditching the assembly line-style deployment flow and instead using continuous deployment and integration processes.
Thanks for reading! In the rest of this eBook you’ll learn:
- How Netlify developer workflows differ from more traditional architectures
- Which features are most valuable for unlocking developer productivity
- Examples of how to implement Netlify to increase output and get to market more quickly
- What other Netlify customers are doing to deploy up to 20x faster
- And more!
