Common Experience Program Rollout

Context

Common Experience (CE) is a multi-year effort to improve consistency and usability across AFT products—reducing time-to-proficiency and making workflows easier to learn across the fulfillment network.

Because AFT products are owned by autonomous teams with different stacks, constraints, and priorities, CE required an adoption-driven model. Rather than mandate a single solution, the program paired clear standards with reusable patterns and practical support so teams could implement improvements within existing roadmaps.

Vision and targets

CE was framed as a three-year roadmap. By the end of 2026, the program targeted $250MM+ in annualized cost savings and a 25–35% reduction in UI development effort through reuse and clearer standards.

In 2024, the initial target was $5.3MM in annualized savings, driven by a 3.75% improvement in time-to-proficiency for Pack, Decant, and Receive process paths. A secondary goal was saving approximately 115 SDE weeks by expanding reusable UX primitives for engineering teams.

Approach

Year 1 focus: research + foundational standards

In Year 1 (2024), CE focused on software experiences and establishing a baseline for fulfillment environments—accounting for device variability, lighting, screen quality, sound usage, and accessibility constraints.

In Q2, task-level research was conducted across Pack, Decant, and Receive. Findings informed requirement refinement and helped identify the primitives needed for consistent delivery across tools.

Reusable primitives to accelerate delivery

For Operator workflows, CE prioritized primitives that could unlock faster delivery across multiple tools. In parallel with Associate workflow work, the team initiated primitives such as Tables, Data Visualization, and Filters to accelerate interface development in Flow Management Hub (FMH).

Adoption mechanisms

To support adoption in a decentralized organization, CE paired standards with lightweight enablement. Documentation, intake processes, and office hours helped teams align earlier, reduced ambiguity, and lowered review churn without adding heavy process overhead.

My role

I supported rollout execution alongside the program team. While the Program Manager led operational planning and delivery, I participated in core working sessions to clarify CER terminology, guide application to design artifacts, and support partner teams through implementation questions.

I also served as a bar raiser in CE reviews, helped define the intake model (including compliance expectations and support paths), and partnered with the team to scope pilot products and teams for phased adoption.

Why this mattered

Without a structured rollout and intake model, teams would continue building in isolation—duplicating effort and producing mismatched experiences. That fragmentation pushes the learning burden onto Associates and Operators, who encounter different interaction patterns for the same task depending on the tool.

The rollout model created a practical path for standards and patterns to spread across products while respecting adoption realities: teams had limited capacity for additional work, and success depended on making the compliant path straightforward.

Outcomes

• Established a phased rollout model aligned to adoption constraints in autonomous product backlogs
• Completed task-level research informing requirements and primitives for Pack, Decant, and Receive
• Defined early experience standards optimized for fulfillment-environment constraints
• Initiated Operator primitives (Tables, Data Visualization, Filters) to accelerate FMH delivery
• Launched support mechanisms (intake process, office hours) to reduce rework and clarify compliance expectations

Reflection

CE rollout reinforced a core lesson: large-scale UX change is an enablement problem. Adoption depends on clear standards, reusable primitives, and support paths teams can execute within real roadmaps—without relying on mandate authority.