DEERE: PLATFORM UNIFICATION
Unifying navigation across 47 acquired properties with zero-downtime migration—enabling a single customer view
47
Sites Unified
0
Downtime
45%
Faster Handoffs
40+
Teams Aligned
The Strategic Problem
Deere's digital ecosystem had grown organically over 20+ years through acquisitions, resulting in 47 disparate customer experiences with no unified navigation. A farmer using precision ag software had no clear path to parts ordering or financing—hurting adoption and reinforcing siloed perceptions of value.
The challenge wasn't just visual consistency. It was creating a unified experience across independent teams, legacy systems, and multiple brands—without breaking anything.
Why This Was Hard
This wasn't a design refresh—it was organizational coordination at enterprise scale:
- Governance complexity: 40+ product teams with independent backlogs, priorities, and release cycles
- Brand diversity: 6 acquired companies with distinct brand identities and customer expectations
- Technical fragmentation: Legacy systems with varying tech stacks, APIs, and deployment patterns
- Zero tolerance for downtime: Farmers depend on these tools during critical planting and harvest windows
- Cross-platform scope: Web, mobile, and in-cab displays all needed consistent patterns
A top-down mandate would have created resistance. A bottom-up approach would have taken years.
Strategy
We treated this as a governance problem first, design problem second. Our approach:
- Shared Ownership: Established navigation as a cross-team concern with clear roles, not a central team's mandate
- Progressive Adoption: Migrated sites in waves, gathering feedback and iterating between phases—no big-bang rollout
- Value-First Positioning: Framed unification as "unlocking cross-sell and customer satisfaction" not "enforcing consistency"
- Platform Flexibility: Patterns adapted for context—web, mobile, and in-cab displays—while maintaining conceptual coherence
Execution
Design System as Contract
Built shared navigation components in Figma with clear specs, usage guidelines, and governance processes. Teams could adopt at their own pace, but the contract was clear.
Cross-Functional Alignment
Weekly syncs with engineering, product, and brand stakeholders ensured buy-in and surfaced blockers early. Navigation became a shared language, not a design team deliverable.
Zero-Downtime Migration
Coordinated rollouts with engineering to ensure no customer-facing disruption. Each wave was tested, monitored, and validated before proceeding.
Results
- Consolidated 47 fragmented experiences into a single trusted navigation paradigm
- Reduced design-to-development handoff time by 45% through standardized components
- Achieved zero downtime during migration
- Established an enterprise design system used by 6 brands and 40+ teams globally
What This Unlocked
This work created:
- A reusable governance model for future cross-team initiatives
- Customer confidence in Deere as a unified digital platform, not a collection of tools
- A foundation for the Forced Adoption work—unified navigation made cross-product onboarding possible
The real outcome was proving that enterprise-scale design unification is possible without top-down mandates—if you treat it as a coordination problem.
Gallery
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