Unleashing Enterprise Business Agility requires routine maintenance and long-term investments in areas such as architecture and product management; combined with ongoing investment in coaching and training of lean-agile principles to empowered teams.
Over 150 companies and schools have visited Target, eager to tour our dojo, and there's one question they’ve asked more than any other: “How did you change your culture so quickly?”
As a large retailer in the U.S., Target's Agile and DevOps adoption has attracted significant interest. So, how did we do it? I have two answers. The first one is simple: we just started. We didn’t create an elaborate plan; we kept it simple, jumped right in, listened, learned, and adapted along the way. Yet, this concept is surprisingly difficult for many companies because leaders often want detailed transformation plans. But if we had tried to predict and plan our evolution, it never would have happened.
The second answer, which I will cover in this talk, is about the key investments we made to build the foundation for agility at Target. We’ll share our evolution, our vision for enterprise business agility, and a real example of agility coming to life at Target.
Meet the Speakers
My name is Travis Klinker, and I am the Director of Agile and Engineering Enablement at Target. My team of coaches supports the entire organization, and we operate the Target Dojo, our immersive learning space.
Hi, I’m Ross Levy, an Agile Product Coach on Travis’s team. I’ll be sharing how we’ve greased the gears towards enterprise business agility—highlighting key elements of our journey, connection points, and what it takes to build momentum.
Setting the Foundation for Agility
Our transformation started by focusing on three foundational elements:
- Executive Support: Our CIO, new to the company, understood the value of a product model, Agile, and DevOps. He provided the air cover we needed to fuel grassroots efforts into the norm of working.
- Engineering Culture: We established a solid architectural strategy and built design systems to support agility.
- Internal Coaching Team: We formed a dedicated team to provide training, coaching, and support—empowering teams to work in an Agile way. Initially, this started in IT but has since expanded to the business side as well.
Agility Beyond IT: The Learning & Development Team
Our journey towards enterprise agility extended beyond IT. It started in our immersive learning environment in Minneapolis when a few individuals from our Learning & Development department became intrigued by Agile. Their existing model, called the ADDIE Model (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate), had been in place since 1975. They saw how Agile aligned with process improvement and approached us for guidance.
Through rapid iteration, we uncovered a crucial insight: training content development and software delivery are fundamentally similar. Both benefit from Agile ways of working. The team realized, “Because of the skills you introduced, we can now publish training content daily.” However, without true team agility, there was a risk of spinning wheels without traction.
So, we brought their entire team into the dojo and helped them solidify their Agile practices. We introduced swarming, story splitting, and cross-training—allowing them to work in a more incremental and iterative way.
Scaling Agility: Product Teams & Lean Portfolio Management
Once we established team agility, we needed to scale. We moved from projects to stable product teams, focusing on capabilities that support specific products. Instead of relying on a framework for scaling, we focused on:
- Building team agility.
- Developing strong product management and cross-functional collaboration.
- Implementing Lean Portfolio Management—shifting from annual planning to a six-month cycle focused on outcomes.
- Moving from yearly planning to quarterly planning, ensuring alignment on business outcomes.
Our Agile coaches played a key role in facilitating these changes. Writing effective objectives and key results (OKRs) was challenging at first, but after three or four planning cycles, teams became much more comfortable.
Expanding Agility: Cross-Functional Collaboration
We soon realized that team agility alone wasn’t enough. Many initiatives required collaboration across HR, Finance, and Operations. Without that alignment, progress risked being stalled. So, we worked to secure buy-in from leadership and formed cross-functional teams of teams.
In our dojo, we focused on product definition—creating problem statements, drafting OKRs, and aligning teams. The impact was immediate. After just three days, a team member said:
“I typically don’t get involved this early, but the shared understanding and collaboration allowed us to accomplish more in three days than in the prior two months.”
This success came down to three factors:
- Product Definition: Clear alignment on the “why.”
- Hyper-Focused Dojo Format: Reinforced Agile mindsets.
- Daily Cross-Functional Collaboration: Eliminated silos.
Strategic Agility: Putting the Customer at the Center
Next, we shifted our focus to strategic agility, enabling us to innovate, identify new markets, and create products that delight customers. This required two key shifts:
- Anchoring strategy around the customer.
- Embedding experimentation as a core responsibility for all teams, not just an innovation department.
By using Agile methods, teams could rapidly experiment and validate their work with customers. Our coaches helped teams ensure their experiments were meaningful and aligned with strategy.
Operational Agility: Fine-Tuning the Organization
Looking ahead, our focus is on operational agility—transforming corporate divisions like Finance, HR, and Procurement to remove barriers that hinder Agile ways of working. If company policies don’t support Agile teams, we ask:
- What is this policy trying to accomplish?
- Is it still relevant?
- How can we achieve the same goal in an Agile-friendly way?
Coaches play a vital role in fine-tuning the organization—adjusting policies like tuning a guitar, ensuring every part is aligned and in harmony.
Why Enterprise Business Agility Matters
Enterprise Business Agility is critical for Target because:
- Economic and demographic changes are happening rapidly.
- Consumer behavior is evolving due to technology and innovation.
- Customers care about socially responsible companies and products.
- The competitive landscape is shifting, with niche players emerging.
We must be able to react to market changes and seize new opportunities in a productive and cost-effective way.
The Role of Coaching
Coaching is central to our transformation. A great analogy is professional sports—when a team wins a championship, do they fire all the coaches and expect them to win again? No. Coaches continuously push teams to improve, adapt, and stay competitive.
Parting Thoughts
- Be Curious: Inspiration can come from unexpected places.
- Seek Thought Partners: Learn from others and iterate.
- Empower People: The way forward is emergent, not predefined.
- Leverage Executive Support: Use air cover to explore and innovate.
- Just Start: Don’t overplan—jump in and adapt as you go.
If you’d like to learn more, visit dojo.target.com. We’re defining what enterprise business agility looks like for us, but we’d love to hear your stories as well. Find us afterward—thank you!