Bidding for the initial scope of work, the CVS pitch team shared hesitations about taking the retailer and health services provider on a client. After all, within the agency community, CVS had earned a historically poor reputation. So incredibly difficult to manage and work with, they have been fired as a client by some celebrated agencies within the industry including R/GA and Grey.

With an e-commerce effort that inevitably would impact every aspect of the organization, we knew many executive eyes would be focused on our efforts. If we won the pitch, we’d need to do some heavy preparation and contingency planning — as the agency team — managing a client where in-house executive stakeholders championed competing, often incompatible visions. 

Pre-pandemic, CVS had a physical retailer footprint of nearly 10,000 stores across the United States. Though their individual stores are not as large as say a Target, or Wal-mart, e-commerce experiences for retailers that huge are incredibly extensive. To boot, the COVID pandemic forced CVS (and many retailers) to supplement their delivery and fulfillment options, adding new features, such as curbside pick-up and direct-to-consumer delivery. 

With the extensive collection of products, features and integrations we’d need to solve for, we needed to cast an extensive agency-team:

We planned rigorously with our our day-to-day client stakeholders, agreeing to pursue a typical review and approval cycle: UX artefacts > Visual design 

The review cycle was initially built to have 2 rounds of review and approval by our day-to-day stakeholders prior to presenting to CVS’ executive review committee consisting of their Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Design Officer and the Head of Product Management — 3 company leaders who very rarely shared the same space.

Our first executive review quickly went off the rails, forcing a work-stoppage and requiring several frustrating debriefs for the agency team.

While we anticipated difficulties managing this client, we assumed that CVS, as a company that implemented design thinking and solutioning internally (they have an internal creative agency, called HeartHaus), would be familiar with a waterfall design process.

Not only were we informed that UX artefacts were not to be shown during review, we also learned our executives had not aligned their respective goals.

Several weeks of planning, internal to the Razorfish team and negotiations around a now impacted and compressed delivery timeline forced our team to rethink how we were going to approach this client.

If you’ve worked agency-side, you know that clients as difficult as CVS can be morale and team killers. Our team had already collectively committed hundreds of hours of work in order to arrive at the executive review, only for the work to fall flat. Questions swirled about potentially having to re-do UX that had been hard negotiated.

Our UX was solid and well informed, and, despite the poor feedback, we ultimately realized that we needed to lead with visual design for our executive review.

Discipline leaders such as myself worked with our day-to-day client stakeholders to understand how CVS operated creatively. We approached CVS’ Chief Design Officer to understand the role UX played in the organization and ultimately came to the agreement that it was ok to keep UX reviews to day-to-day stakeholders, and, that presenting near-final creative to executives, we needed to advocate for UX during those sessions.

Nearly three weeks after the initial review, we arrived once again at executive review ready to present our work.