Agility is the magic word

Our Team Impact works across units and represents a crucial step towards our new corporate culture. What makes us strong can already be found in a world famous novel for young people. But in contrast to Harry Potter, we’re all about customer perspectives and new ways of thinking.

The books of my youth set the stage: those who have read the Harry Potter series know that Albus Dumbledore is the Headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry – and is smart to boot. His motto is that we are only as strong as we are united. Teamwork is emphasized throughout the Harry Potter novels. Winning the fight against evil means everyone pulling together. Only by combining the various magical powers, skills and strengths of every individual can triumph be ensured. And that could also be the motto for our Team Impact.

We’re a self-organized team within the Swiss Post Digital Commerce Competence Center, which was founded in early 2020 by specialists from various units (customer experience, data analytics and product management).

The goal we pursue as a team is to promote and strengthen interdisciplinary dialogue between the Digital Commerce Competence Center’s various teams.

Regular dialogue

Our team wants to lead by example and demonstrate that the best ideas for customers come about by incorporating as many different perspectives as possible into the solution-finding process. This is why we exchange ideas on current topics, problems and potential customer pain points every three weeks. Special emphasis is given to the “My consignments” product.

During meetings we work together to identify and prioritize problems, establish and validate solution hypotheses and finally implement them. A “problem pool” is created where we record all the tasks and issues relating to the “My consignments” product. The pool serves as a place to store all the team’s measures.

Taking new ways of thinking into account

The advantage of the team lies in cross-unit perspectives, which give us more sources from which input can flow. Each team member brings different knowledge. This allows us to adopt various perspectives and gives rise to new insights and ideas. Data from the Analytics Team is often an important source of inspiration for new projects.

This agile and data-driven collaboration is extremely valuable to the Digital Commerce Competence Center as it enables us to consider projects from various standpoints and develop holistic solutions. Synergies are used to drive products forward quickly and efficiently and implement them successfully.

Our next steps

Once we’ve finished the team-building phase, we ask ourselves what the next steps for Team Impact are. Our work culture has been refined, the goals defined and the procedure decided on. Now we want to continue growing as a team and hone our processes. Agile working methods make us faster and more efficient, from identifying problems through to implementing the prototype on the market.

Our magic formula is like Harry Potter’s: “Let’s do some magic – work together and create impact.”