How RetailNow Accelerated Their Product Releases by 52%
In an industry where speed equals revenue, RetailNow transformed their development process and dramatically accelerated time-to-market.
The Challenge: RetailNow's e-commerce platform serves thousands of retailers and millions of shoppers. But their development cycles were lagging behind market demands. Features that retailers urgently needed were taking months to reach production. The invisible roadblocks weren't just delaying releases—they were costing market share.
When Fast Isn't Fast Enough
In retail, yesterday's innovation is today's expectation.
RetailNow had built a reputation for innovation, but their delivery speed couldn't keep pace with their ideas. They were losing the gap between conception and creation—the critical space where competitors could move in.
"We had no shortage of brilliant ideas and talented developers. What we lacked was visibility into what was actually slowing us down. We were treating symptoms while the real obstacles remained invisible."
— Maya Rodriguez, VP of Product, RetailNow
The cost wasn't measured just in delayed features. It was measured in market opportunity. Every week a feature stayed in development instead of in production meant thousands of lost transactions.
The E-commerce Acceleration Problem
E-commerce moves at the speed of consumer expectations.
When shoppers can compare your platform to Amazon in seconds, "coming soon" becomes "too late." RetailNow wasn't just competing with other platforms—they were competing with the expectation of immediate.
Uncovering the Invisible Patterns
RetailNow implemented Wallow with a single focus: make the invisible obstacles visible to everyone involved in the development process.
- Complete visibility into development obstacles across product, design, and engineering teams
- Real-time identification of bottlenecks in the feature release pipeline
- Pattern recognition that revealed recurring obstacles in the payment processing integration flows
- Shared awareness of dependencies between front-end and back-end development teams
What They Found
The patterns revealed by Wallow were surprising and transformative.
"We discovered that 64% of our delays stemmed from just three recurring patterns in how our teams coordinated API changes. Issues we'd never connected before suddenly revealed themselves as variations of the same underlying problem."
— David Chen, CTO, RetailNow
From Visibility to Velocity
Seeing the obstacles was just the beginning. The real transformation came from what RetailNow did next.
Instead of treating each release as a unique challenge, they began addressing the patterns. Systemic solutions replaced individual workarounds. And development velocity increased dramatically.
The Multiplier Effect
When RetailNow solved the three core patterns that Wallow revealed, they didn't just fix current delays—they prevented future ones.
The result was a 52% acceleration in time-to-market for new features. Features that once took 10 weeks now reached production in under 5 weeks. In retail, that difference is measured in millions.
Within six months of implementing Wallow, RetailNow launched their most ambitious platform update ever—two months ahead of schedule. Customer adoption rates tripled compared to previous releases. And developer satisfaction scores reached an all-time high.
Beyond Speed: Quality and Confidence
The most unexpected benefit wasn't just speed—it was quality.
When obstacles became visible, testing became more focused. Edge cases that would have been discovered by customers were caught early. Support tickets decreased by 41% compared to previous releases.
"We used to debate whether to ship faster or better. Now we do both because we're no longer fighting invisible obstacles. We're fixing systems, not just shipping features."
— Maya Rodriguez, VP of Product, RetailNow
In retail, the gap between idea and implementation is where opportunities live or die. By making obstacles visible, RetailNow didn't just ship faster—they changed what's possible in e-commerce development.
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