A $3M app that couldn't hold ten users.
My first titled product job: a net-new track-and-trace app for intermodal, BNSF's largest business line. Testing told the truth the roadmap wouldn't. It crashed past ten concurrent users. I delivered the news that a project $3M in, over budget and overdue, would never ship.
It wasn't an intermodal problem.
The failed app did what dozens already did, only differently. 110+ customer-facing apps, built in silos, giving different answers. Customer Support employed 3 entire teams just to fix customer entry errors. The front door, BNSF's authenticated Customer Portal, hadn't been touched since 2006… BEFORE the iPhone.
One problem, not one department's.
Five principles. Six departments. One CoP.
The pitch landed. I stood up a cross-department Customer Experience Community of Practice, governed by five principles:
- Do right by customers: upgrade the portal first.
- Work together, not against each other.
- Leverage what we own: build on Salesforce.
- Remove duplication; enhance where needed.
- Use data, and where there's none, talk to customers.
Where we had no data, we talked to customers.
The first portal update since before the iPhone.
A funded, five-year strategy across six departments: 14 net-new products, including the industry's first shipment Geo-Fence, plus apps retired and jobs modernized end to end. 80K+ users. ~$23B in annual business.
The public record.
BNSF announced the shift publicly, in the company's own words, with the "one experience" thesis validated by a customer.