About Deda Stealth
Deda Stealth is an Italian business and technology solutions company that has been operating for over 30 years in the fashion and luxury industry, offering Fashion Technology solutions and know-how to 60% of Italian luxury brands around the globe. With more than 400 professionals and dozens of active projects worldwide, Deda Stealth’s mission is to support brands in their growth and assist them in facing the market transformations of tomorrow through innovation and process digitization.
Deda Stealth's main solution is the Fashion Platform called 'Stealth', which is a platform designed to manage the processes of the fashion and luxury retail industry (from production to supply chain and retail operations) in an integrated way, offering solutions to boost supply chain governance and enable sustainable omnichannel business strategies.
To continuously innovate and provide cutting edge retail solutions to their clients and partners, Deda Stealth leverages deep expertise in the fashion industry developed over many years, and by nurturing key talent. Their goal is to reinforce and continue to expand their market presence, especially at an international level.
To achieve this ambitious goal, and stay ahead of their competitors, they partnered with Thoughtworks to modernize their way of working, both organizationally and structurally, by improving their product and technology landscape.
Objectives and technological challenges
Thoughtworks partnered with Deda Stealth to:
Modernize their platform.
Ideate and deliver new products, while also enhancing and accelerating their existing product development capabilities.
Create and sustain organizational and cultural change to build a modern engineering organization.
Thoughtworks’ journey with Deda Stealth started with a discovery where we explored their transformation goals, challenges and product pain points. We uncovered the opportunities a platform strategy could enable, as well as outlining the cultural and mindset shift needed in the product teams.
Together we outlined the vision and a platform strategy to incrementally evolve Stealth in a more composable-savvy set of products. A suite of independent solutions empowered by common cloud-enabled platforms capabilities, along with the adoption of a new agile and lean approach.
To execute, we selected two business functions as a pilot: the OMS (Order Management System) and Connect (a Supply Chain collaboration tool to connect brands and suppliers), to extract from the monolith and create independent products while also upskilling the delivery team with new product thinking capabilities, and agile practices.
The results
Since embarking on this journey, we have implemented the core platform capabilities needed to enable two teams and deliver two new products that have been adopted in the market.
The cross-functional teams are fully empowered to make decisions for the product they are trying to build. They work autonomously with an adaptive mindset, following modern engineering practices and a user-centered approach to understand clients’ problems and ideate new features with a very participative and short cycle from idea to solution.
Both OMS and Connect are market-leading products, built to be user friendly, easy to adopt and personalized to contribute to our clients’ efficiency and success. We aimed to deliver and evolve a focused, intuitive and empowering user experience to gain client confidence and satisfaction. We conducted usability tests with early adopters to measure the effort score of their key user tasks, and error rates of the key user tasks. We also observed if the users could perform their tasks independently, and where their bottlenecks were, iterating further to provide a self-service solution.
From a technological perspective, platform thinking has driven the design and development of those products from the very beginning. General platform guidelines are provided for all the teams to follow, while independence in execution is ensured as technological choices could vary based on business domain.
Each product team is autonomous and has complete control to select the appropriate technological stack to achieve the best output for the end users and customers. At the same time, an enabling platform ecosystem (built by adding specific platform capabilities) is incrementally developed in an evolutionary architecture style, using microservices. This guarantees the development of solutions that are independent and highly performant but also easy for clients and partners to integrate with.
The methodology principles shared with Thoughtworks facilitated and emphasized the application of certain values such as product and customer focus, continuous improvement and quality of the results achieved.
The methodology principles shared with Thoughtworks facilitated and emphasized the application of certain values such as product and customer focus, continuous improvement and quality of the results achieved.
Evolutionary architecture style
For front-end development, we used React, and from an architectural point of view, we used Apache Kafka to create a messaging backbone that is highly scalable and synchronizes the microservices. Document storage, as a platform capability, will leverage Google Cloud storage.
Giovanni Botta, Innovation and Technical Manager at Deda Stealth, shared that this work has helped Deda Stealth to reshape the way they provide value to their customers, allowing faster feedback, better alignment and more flexibility in adapting to changing requirements and customer needs. Indeed, one of the main outcome has been the successful architecting and re-architecting of their Stealth Platform, which integrates and streamlines the business processes and data of their customers.
Working with Thoughtworks helped to enhance the efficiency, productivity, profitability, and improved the customer experience and satisfaction. Thanks to Thoughtworks and the adoption of a product thinking approach, we can achieve a new way to think about the Stealth platform with the ultimate goal to deliver value to our customers.
Working with Thoughtworks helped to enhance the efficiency, productivity, profitability, and improved the customer experience and satisfaction. Thanks to Thoughtworks and the adoption of a product thinking approach, we can achieve a new way to think about the Stealth platform with the ultimate goal to deliver value to our customers.
