My Digital Transformation Playbook
This is the digital transformation playbook I've been refining since my first engineering leadership role. I call it eUSA. Three minutes — or if you'd rather read than watch, the breakdown is below.
I used it at adidas to unify what was effectively six separate engineering teams into one global platform serving 50 markets. At Sweetgreen I used it as my CTO playbook to build a tech function from zero. The underlying problem is usually the same: someone made a bunch of decisions optimized for the moment, and now those decisions are a wall. This is how I think about knocking that wall down without burning the building.
The framework
Easy
Friction is a tax your team pays every day. A new engineer who can't be productive in week one is a systems problem, not a people problem. I've seen billion-dollar platforms grind because six teams couldn't deploy without stepping on each other.
Ubiquity
A platform decision made for one market becomes a cage for the next fifteen. I watched this at adidas — choices that made sense for Germany took 18 months to undo before we could roll out across Asia. Build for the hardest case first.
Security with Speed
Security teams that slow delivery get bypassed. Security built into the process from day one doesn't. There's no tradeoff to manage if you set it up right — that's the whole thing.
Accountability through Analytics
What gets measured gets managed, and that's usually where accountability goes sideways. Story points go up, customer satisfaction falls, nobody connects the dots. Measure outcomes. Build the instrumentation before you think you need it.
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