Enterprise and Data with AI
We used to ship POS and loyalty updates in 7-10 days. Then we added a “lightweight” process and it became 6 weeks.
It was a mid-market grocery chain, 80 stores, a small IT team, and too many late-night rollbacks. We also had PCI and privacy reviews coming up, so more structure felt responsible.
We introduced design templates, a weekly steering call, and sign-offs for anything touching payments or customer data. The goal was fewer surprises.
What actually happened is the work shifted from testing assumptions to writing them down. People got rewarded for having the right attachments, not for making the change safer.
When something broke, the room got quiet, then someone pulled up the signed doc. The failure still cost us, it just came with a paper trail.
And in January 2026, with the new CCPA obligations kicking in, the default move is to add another template instead of making decisions clearer.
We cut the checklist to five risk questions and kept a simple decision log in the same channel as the rollout. Cycle time dropped by weeks and incidents got cheaper to unwind.
It makes me wonder how often “process” is really just future blame assignment.