On May 21, 2025, Kanban edition 2 will be released by Dunod publishing, co-written with Laurent Morisseau. I’m proud of this new edition because with the first one, we both found ourselves stuck halfway through. In this one, we worked together to renew or revisit or reformulate or refine our positions, and it has a much better flavor.
This upcoming edition is also an opportunity to ask Hinde Pagani, CEO of Hermès Digital Sales & Services to write our preface. You’ll discover through this preface that we’ve now known each other for several years and the pleasure I have in supporting her.
Laurent and I are very busy at the moment (Laurent is launching his foundation for agile enterprises, I’ve just launched the masterclasses for Projet Winston and I’ve just released a much more personal work, the petit manuel de pensée organisationnelle), we hope to meet you at conferences or events, don’t hesitate to invite us, or to have us come speak at your companies.
Here is the preface for Kanban edition 2 at Dunod:
Preface for Kanban edition 2 by Hinde Pagani
The Hermes.com online store was born in 2002. In 2015, this store still charms its customers, but needs to be modernized and renovated since it wasn’t designed for mobile, and must be able to support a strong increase in traffic and sales.
The challenge is immense! Many working groups are established with highly motivated teams around this major project and quickly, everything is defined, specified in the smallest details in a 186-page specification document, focused mainly on customer experience and service.
However, after a few inconclusive months of the project – and development entrusted to a partner - we had to face the facts: the site wasn’t working and the initially allocated budget had been consumed.
In a saving surge, for this new online store, we decide to move toward this new form of development called agile, to rebuild step by step, brick by brick, iterating to allow constant feedback from our customers and internal users.
This is the beginning of a new iterative and incremental approach, revolutionary for the team at the time. With an agile heart, nothing is impossible!
A new objective is thus set, with an 80% scope reduction compared to the initial specification document. And we divided the enormous remaining task into many small-sized elements called “user stories” designed to be tested autonomously and to allow an incremental and flexible approach.
We establish short development cycles, called sprints, during which teams regularly plan, execute and review their work based on feedback and evolving priorities. What an incredible transformation!
Indeed, there are a multitude of user stories: some large, others small, and all with variable value. From now on, the team always puts forward the most important user stories. Those that offer the most added value for the customer while requiring the least effort from the team. And this will allow them to handle all requests with an unbeatable prioritization method.
And progressively we formed small teams, called “feature teams” with functional and technical profiles who commit together, during a PI Planning day (Programme Increment Planning), to carry out these developments.
Each feature team is autonomous, meaning they define, taking technique into account from the design phase, what they can accomplish in the given period. Why is this important? Because it allows them to go faster and make decisions quickly while enabling alignment. And it’s very motivating!
Many years later, we finish the 27th PI planning, we’ve established a permanent delivery flow of digital stores around the world with hundreds of new services put online each year, we constantly improve the journeys, and we continuously manage technological evolutions.
Today, e-commerce is so strategic at Hermès that we decided to master all its expertise. We internalized the development know-how and established new teams of artisans, the code artisans.
The code artisans have many things in common with our craft artisans: a quality requirement, a desire to combine know-how and aesthetics, an ability to manage a product from end to end. The importance of empowerment and autonomy of the person. They’re not in a Taylorist approach of mechanical cutting, of one gesture passing to another gesture, in anonymity, where everything is assembled at the end.
The code artisans are responsible from end to end for the feature manufacturing process. What they love is delivering continuously, several times a day, to get rapid customer feedback.
The material they handle is more about flow than product. And this constant flow of small pieces prioritized by value was accompanied by automation of the entire production chain.
This flow is the same as that of our craft artisans, this Japanese kanban, with the rhythm and speed of digital transformation.
Every day, we limit technical risks and increase quality by testing everything automatically: loading time, number of simultaneous users, security, proper integration of the latest requests. Development and deployment are done continuously. We also monitor the performance indicators of our features to learn, constantly adapt to change and deal with the unexpected.
With agile, continuous flow development, we’ve gained unmatched responsiveness, which allows us to deliver to production dozens of times per day.
We’ve also gained an ability to pivot more than a hundred people organized in responsible and autonomous teams overnight if the stakes require it.
Mastering Kanban has given us a major competitive advantage, that of going faster, being lighter, quicker, more resilient in a complex world.
It has also forged a particular team culture. An entrepreneurial culture, which has been built over the years, around the company’s values of collaboration, transparency, quality and leadership, and which unites a committed, enthusiastic team, full of energy and ready to take on new challenges.
In this new book, Pablo Pernot, who supported us throughout this transformation as an agile coach, offers with Laurent Morisseau an approach and concrete tools to integrate agility into an organization and demonstrates that there are few alternatives to remaining high-performing in a complex world, where everything is constantly changing.
Hinde Pagani,
CEO of Hermès Digital Sales and Services
