Why It Matters
This project exemplifies what happens when human-centered design meets technical rigor: major time and cost savings. By focusing on systems thinking, user needs, and scalable architecture, the organization created a path forward that supports both immediate impact and long-term innovation. At 8th Light, we help enterprise teams remove friction, foster alignment, and build tools that scale with confidence. This story is one of many showing how that approach delivers lasting results. Let’s build the next product innovation together.
The Challenge: A Strong System Slowed by Scale
A Fortune 100 consumer technology company had built a powerful experimentation pipeline — one that fueled product innovation across its digital ecosystem. But as the platform grew, so did its complexity. Manual approvals, fragmented workflows, and inconsistent tools created friction that slowed development cycles and added risk. Rather than patch over the pain points, the company sought a bold transformation to reduce this risk: to turn a solid foundation into a modern, scalable, and self-service experimentation platform.
The Goals
- Accelerate the end-to-end experimentation pipeline
- Reduce manual bottlenecks and operational risk
- Align cross-functional teams around shared metrics and ownership
- Unlock safe, scalable innovation at speed
Our Approach: Human-Centered Meets Technically Grounded
8th Light was brought in to lead a seven-week high-level assessment, blending human-centered design with technical architecture and organizational strategy. We followed the Double-Diamond Process to move from discovery to delivery:
- Problem Discovery
- Problem Synthesis
- Solution Discovery
- Solution Synthesis
The Timeline
Weeks 1-2: Understanding the Friction
We kicked off with deep interviews across engineering and product leadership. These conversations uncovered systemic blockers — ranging from delays in approvals to lack of experiment ownership. Weekly playback sessions helped align stakeholders and refine the focus on the end-to-end experimentation lifecycle.
Week 3: Visualizing the Lifecycle
An onsite design-thinking workshop brought cross-functional stakeholders together to map the full experimentation journey — from idea to deployment, iteration, and promotion. This exercise revealed not just pain points, but opportunities to simplify and scale.
Weeks 4-6: Defining a Scalable Vision
With clear problem statements and user needs in hand, we developed a vision for a streamlined, automated experimentation platform. We established guiding principles and surfaced four high-impact recommendations, each supported by detailed, outcomes-driven roadmaps.
Week 7: Delivering Actionable Recommendations
We wrapped with an onsite final presentation to leadership, supported by:
- A prioritized roadmap for system and process improvements
- Four RFCs (Requests for Comments) for key technical changes
- A service blueprint of the experimentation lifecycle
- A visual synthesis connecting research insights, design principles, and recommended solutions
The Impact: From Bottlenecks to Breakthroughs
The initial 7-week assessment laid the foundation for a multi-phase transformation. By aligning cross-functional teams and delivering a clear vision, roadmap, and service blueprint, the organization was equipped with the tools and strategy needed to move forward.
In follow-on engagements, the organization began implementing the recommendations from our assessment—resulting in measurable improvements to experimentation velocity and developer experience:
- Update lead time reduced from 8 days to 2 hours ✅
- Manual steps in experiment deployment dropped from 9 to 1 ✅
- Onboarding time reduced from 15 weeks to 2 days ✅
- Increased team autonomy and alignment across engineering ✅
This progression exemplifies how strategic assessment—when paired with continued execution—can enable safe, scalable, and high-velocity experimentation.
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