Henrique Imbertti has been into tech companies since 2002. Working as a designer and developer he experienced agile methods for the first time in 2004. Since 2008 he has been working as a change agent/lean-agile coach in order to help companies to face the VUCA world, to deal with knowledge workers, and to adopt modern management practices.

Currently he is the director of organizational agility at Magalu, a Brazilian digital transformation case. He lived in Sweden for 3 years, worked as an Agile Coach at Spotify and experienced the evolution of a digital company. Before that he worked with some startups, and at Yahoo! Brazil - where he had his first contact with the Silicon Valley culture.

He has an MBA in project management and BA and Design, so customer centricity and design thinking is part of his DNA.

Exponential Growth and Organizational Agility at Magalu
(Largest Retail Chain in Brazil)

Imagine you are invited to help a retail company that is almost 60 years old to become more digital. This company is large, with more than 20000 employees, the IT department is conservative, and its stakeholders aren't happy due to long lead times and constant issues in production. What would you do to launch new and innovative products such as mobile apps? Lots of organizations have been talking about digital and agile transformation, therefore this session intends to walk you through the story of Luizalabs, an innovation lab that is part of one of the biggest retail companies in Brazil, Magalu. How was it created? What was the main challenges? What is a Galapagos Islands strategy? How has been the growth, and how it has been spreading throughout the entire company?

The company used to be "a retail business with an IT department" and now has become "a digital platform with physical stores and human touch". Given the relevance of the digital, the last reports released to investors mention the Lab a couple of times. We are organized in small teams dedicated to specific missions, the LuizaLabs staff created solutions such as Mobile Sales, present in all of our +1000 stores, which reduced the average sale time from 40 minutes to 4 minutes. Or Mobile Delivery – which enables the 2700 microtransport companies that work for us to track deliveries."

The journey of this organization hasn't finished yet. Actually the next steps are quite challenging because there are international competitors in the Brazilian market and the agile/digital transformation is still in progress.