The workshop

Three sprints. One real project. A delivery design you leave with.

You are the delivery lead. The board has funded one AI initiative at RetailFlow, and your job is to ship it without the predictable failures. You’ll carry one project through three sprints, scoping and stress-testing it by interviewing the RetailFlow team (meet them here).

Each group takes a different initiative, so no two designs look alike. Pick yours:

Customer-service chatbot

Deflect routine queries and cut 26-hour response times, but it’s customer-facing, so confident-wrong answers are a live risk. ($450K, funded.)

Dynamic pricing

Automated price optimisation: high value, high stakes, and the data isn’t ready. ($850K, funded.)

Fraud detection

Cut chargebacks without blocking real customers: a buy-vs-build and threshold-tuning problem. ($650K, funded.)

Inventory optimisation

Forecast and replenish across 50 stores: the broadest scope, tangled in legacy systems. ($1.1M, funded.)

The three sprints

Each sprint hands you one piece of your delivery design. Bring the worksheet (print it, or fill it on your device).

Sprint 1: Scope it against reality

Scoped objectives, data requirements, and a defined ‘good enough’.

Sprint 2: Stakeholders & human-in-the-loop

A stakeholder plan and a human-in-the-loop checkpoint design.

Sprint 3: Roadmap, risk & the go/no-go

A delivery roadmap with gates, a risk register, and the Scale/Pivot/Kill call.

How it fits together

Sprint 1: Scope it against reality. Interview Priya (data) and Marcus (CIO); reconcile “move fast” with “the data isn’t ready”. → scoped objectives, data needs, a defined good enough.
Sprint 2: Stakeholders & human-in-the-loop. Interview Emma (CEO), Tom (frontline) and David (CFO); decide where a human must stay in charge. → stakeholder plan + checkpoint design.
Sprint 3: Roadmap, risk & the go/no-go. Build the plan, then defend it when the staff push back and a crisis hits. → roadmap with gates, risk register, the Scale/Pivot/Kill call.

Tip

The documents you’ll need (board memos, data profiles, vendor proposals, policies) are in RetailFlow’s internal portal. Not everything there is relevant: part of the job is working out what matters.