Watch: How URBN’s retail app update brought together product and engineering

When you’re a huge company with many moving parts, like Navy Yard-based URBN, every efficiency you can squeeze out equals literal thousands in savings.

That’s the thinking behind a recent move to transition to Android devices in URBN stores, as Alex Hasselberger, an URBN product manager, explained in a Technical.ly Developers Conference session at Philly Tech Week 2021 presented by Comcast.

“When you’re in a store, and you have a process that’s going to take a certain amount of time, you have to allocate labor dollars for people to actually implement that process,” she said. “When you create an efficiency in the process, you’re able to save labor dollars that you can allocate elsewhere.”

The switch became an opportunity to showcase the value of research and helped to build a new relationship between product and engineering (and saved the company $200,000), Hasselberger said. She and fellow URBN project managers and UX designers Bueno McCartney, Debbie Lopez, Matt Thomas, Carolina Fojo and Rui Wu described the genesis of the project, their thought process, user testing and trial runs along with addressing the pain-points involved in the retail (user) side.

Watch the full session, slides included, here: