Several years ago, during the Super Bowl, I was working at a small startup when my CTO came to tell me the company was planning a major commercial push to the big game’s millions of global viewers. Unfortunately, he came to me that Sunday morning.
Our engineering team was caught completely off guard – we hadn’t even known a commercial was planned. In the urge to create an amazing surprise, the lack of coordination created a black eye on our brand. This expensive mistake highlighted an ongoing challenge throughout the year, but especially as we get ready for Black Friday.
As retailers gear up for the year’s biggest shopping event, most are focused on crafting compelling promotions and hoping their infrastructure can handle the increased traffic. However, without coordination, even the best-laid campaigns can crumble under pressure. The result? Lost sales, wasted advertising spend and damaged customer trust.
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When Siloed Teams Spell Disaster
One thing I’ve learned throughout my career, going back to my role as an engineering leader at Jet.com (now Walmart.com), is that marketing and engineering teams often speak entirely different languages. Marketing teams focus on driving traffic and conversions while engineering teams concentrate on system stability and scalability. Without coordination, each team ends up guessing about the other’s plans – and they usually guess wrong.
This disconnect can have severe consequences. When I was at an ecommerce company that held the record for the largest Google ad spending in the world, our site still crashed daily at times. We lost leads immediately, and I learned very well that when you keep serving ads to a broken website, people don’t come back.
Beyond Adding Servers: The Real Solution
While many retailers prepare for Black Friday by simply scaling up their infrastructure, this technical-only approach misses the mark. Research shows that 75% of shopping cart abandonment occurs during site slowdowns, and a single minute of downtime during peak hours can cost retailers hundreds of thousands in lost sales. It’s usually not mainly a technical challenge — it’s a coordination and communication challenge.
The solution? Start with a “pre-mortem” approach months before Black Friday, or even in the days before any big event. This exercise brings marketing and engineering teams together to envision potential failures and plan accordingly. Ask each team about their worst-case scenarios: marketing might worry about email promotions failing to drive traffic, while engineering fears system overload.
Understanding each other’s concerns leads to better preparation. Finding out something as simple as when marketing would send out emails to different geographies can help engineering teams pre-stage local servers or plan to move workloads to different geographies to meet regional demand as the campaign reaches people across time zones.
Practical Steps for Cross-Team Success
Here’s how retailers can bridge the gap between teams and prepare for a successful Black Friday:
Create unified communication channels
- Establish dedicated Slack or Teams channels for Black Friday coordination
- Schedule regular cross-team planning meetings
- Ensure all teams know where to go during incidents
Implement technical safeguards
- Design fallback systems that redirect traffic if primary systems fail
- Set up secondary notification systems for critical services for redundancy
- Run “game days” to test system capacity and team response
Align marketing and technical planning
- Share promotional calendars with engineering teams
- Map expected traffic patterns based on marketing initiatives
- Create region-specific infrastructure plans based on promotional targeting
Prepare for incidents
- Establish special on-call rotations for Black Friday
- Set up automated workflows that loop in all necessary teams during incidents
- Pre-schedule post-incident reviews at five, 15 and 30 days after, even if things go well. You can find areas for improvement, and in a case like Black Friday, a five-day review can help boost sales throughout December.
Measuring Success Through Retail KPIs
Smart retailers track specific metrics to gauge their Black Friday readiness:
- Average response time to technical incidents (aim for under five minutes)
- Cart abandonment rate during peak traffic (industry standard is 70.19%)
- Customer experience metrics like page load time (should stay under two seconds)
- Revenue impact per minute of downtime
- Customer retention rate after technical incidents
Modern incident management platforms can help teams monitor these KPIs in real time. When marketing sees a spike in abandoned carts, they can instantly alert engineering through automated workflows. Similarly, when engineering detects performance issues, they can immediately notify marketing to adjust promotional timing or traffic routing. Retailers that implement automated incident response workflows can reduce resolution time dramatically, and significantly decrease revenue impact during critical sales periods.
Building Long-Term Resilience
The benefits of better coordination extend beyond Black Friday. When marketing and engineering teams understand each other’s worlds better, it can transform how they work together. Marketing learns about technical constraints to consider while engineering gains insight into business objectives. This leads to more innovative and reliable solutions year-round, and to be honest, just makes each team smarter and more strategic.
Some organizations take creative approaches to encourage this collaboration. At Jet.com, I launched the “Purple Friday Games” (purple was our brand), creating a leaderboard for teams that completed preparation tasks and fostering friendly competition around readiness for not only Black Friday (or Purple Friday as we called it), but also for other peak shopping days throughout the year.
Looking Ahead
As online shopping continues to grow, the stakes for Black Friday keep rising. Up to 83.2% of Thanksgiving Weekend shoppers make purchases on Black Friday, and retailers can’t afford to let internal silos jeopardize their biggest sales opportunity of the year. Leading retailers are increasingly turning to automated incident management solutions to bridge the gap between teams and protect revenue during peak periods.
The key is starting now. Even with only a few days until Black Friday, retailers can still implement crucial coordination measures. Set up those cross-team channels, integrate your incident management workflows and ensure fallback plans are in place. Most importantly, make sure everyone knows not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it.
Nora Jones is the Senior Director of Product Management at PagerDuty, where she focuses on advancing PagerDuty’s incident management solutions. Previously, she was the Founder and CEO of Jeli.io, a leader in incident management and human-centric technology acquired by PagerDuty in November 2023. She’s also previously held engineering roles at Slack, Netflix, and Jet (acquired by Walmart).
