How Jira and Confluence changed online and in-person retail at Worten

Challenge: Portuguese retail chain Worten wanted to blend digital and in-person retail by integrating their ecommerce platform and network of 250 retail stores.

Solution: Worten implemented Jira and Confluence to facilitate better collaboration, accelerate development velocity, and bring their vision to life.

Impact: More than 1,500 employees now use Atlassian Teamwork Collections for cross-functional workflows, delivering a 5.5x ROI and saving 12,000 hours a year.

Becoming a “digital-first company with a human touch”

Across Portugal, over 50% of people live less than 30 minutes from a Worten store. Consumers rely on the chain for everything from electronics to furniture. Starting in 2018, Worten decided to elevate that convenience even further.

“Our vision is to be a digital company with physical stores and a human touch,” explains Head of Digital Transformation Felipe Ferreira. The goal was to create an integrated customer experience that would connect online shopping with Worten’s network of 250 stores.

To enter this era, Worten built a new systems architecture and organization-wide collaboration platform. With this, program management, task monitoring, and dependency mapping are enabled by Jira and Confluence, part of Atlassian’s Teamwork Collections toolset. Today, nearly 1,500 employees across the organization use this solution to stay focused, productive, and connected as they redefine retail for Portuguese consumers.

Online shopping 🤝 in-person shopping with help from Jira and Confluence

Worten set out to create a true omnichannel shopping experience, with customers interacting both online and in stores. Before the transformation, Worten’s website and app were not fully integrated with retail stores. For example, customers could not make in-person returns for goods purchased online or check in-store stock availability in real time. Now they can — plus more capabilities, like 15-minute click-and-collect orders and 2-hour home delivery.

Worten created the Digital Transformation Team under Felipe’s management to lead this shift. “It was important for us to keep the human touch with our network of stores,” he explains. “Customers need online convenience, but they also want to visit us, touch the products, and talk to people.”

Felipe’s team would help Worten’s IT team ensure smooth delivery and implementation of the new systems architecture — a massive, cross-functional project. “We have many teams working in parallel, and if they can’t easily get input from each other, they’re blocked,” says Felipe.

Before the transformation, Worten teams all used different tools, including OneNote and Excel. Without a central platform, many teams struggled with collaboration, time-consuming meetings, and long email threads.

Once Digital Transformation rolled out Jira and Confluence, 140 teams finally had a shared space to work together. Whenever a team member needs information from another employee, they can simply tag their colleagues and move forward. “Jira and Confluence connect our teams to make magic happen,” says Felipe. “They give us a common language, shared workflows, and make interdependencies clear.”

From Logistics to Legal, Atlassian tools help teams drive action

So far, Worten’s Digital Transformation Team has used Atlassian tools to:

1. Connect technical and development teams with each other to improve product velocity and act on customer feedback faster

2. Link business functions with their respective IT teams to resolve IT issues faster

3. Connect senior leadership to teams' daily work in order to keep decision-making tied to strategic goals

Worten rolled out their digital transformation in waves, starting with high-impact areas of the business. One of these was the main logistics dispatching system. “This system is the heart of our organization, controlling the delivery of goods to our customers,” says Felipe.

The new dispatching system makes more complex in-store and online delivery flows possible. These include self-service order scheduling for customers, automatic inbound orders to maintain stock levels, and picking up unwanted products for disposal as part of delivery service.

At Worten, 17 multi-team “tribes” control these complex delivery flows. Jira keeps them synchronized in real time, with clear visibility into blockers and progress. “We couldn’t have done this without Jira,” says Felipe. “It’s the best thing to manage all this complexity.”

Teams across the business, including Legal, noticed how Jira could improve their work too. “I never would have guessed a legal team could use Jira, because they generally rely on email and phone calls,” says Felipe. “But Jira’s been wonderful for them. It makes lawyer’s workloads and lead time very visible, so it’s easier to prioritize tasks based on urgency, and reallocate if someone goes on vacation.”

Automating and roadmapping with Jira Premium

Worten chose Jira Premium to use Jira Plans' advanced roadmapping capabilities. With Jira Plans, senior leadership shares their strategic priorities in planning meetings, and Felipe’s team adds those priorities to Plans to build roadmaps, guide prioritization, and track cross-team dependencies.

“Jira Plans' advanced roadmaps help us visualize where we have red zones, showing how many tickets, issues, or stories are blocked on each team,” Felipe explains.

Worten also started using Atlassian Automation in Jira Premium to streamline recurring processes. For example, Jira Automatically reminds teams to run the analysis needed for monthly reports. These automated reminders add up at a company of Worten’s scale. At 30 seconds saved per issue, the automation has saved 9 teams a total of 8 hours each month.

Sharing institutional knowledge and processes with Confluence

Confluence acts as Worten’s centralized knowledge base. “All the knowledge and documentation we need lives here, from protocols to meeting takeaways,” says Felipe.

For example, Confluence plays an integral role in Worten’s prioritization. During every planning session, team members document notes and takeaways in their connected workspace. Relevant reports and dashboards from Jira integrate with Confluence pages so teams can discuss outcomes and progress in real time.

Confluence also helps Worten get new hires up to speed. The team created training documents for different departments and roles, each containing important policies, processes, and tutorials on how to use the company’s go-to tools, including Jira.

A new way of working to create groundbreaking customer experiences

Today, Worten’s vision for an omnichannel customer experience is becoming a reality. With Atlassian’s Teamwork Foundation tools, cross-functional collaboration has transformed from a pain to a pleasure.

As teams use Jira and Confluence to speed up communication, they can act on customer feedback and ship new ideas faster. “It’s hard to even estimate how much time we’re saving with Jira,” says Felipe. “We’ve used it to create a new way of working that didn’t exist before.”

Like most retailers, Worten’s operations are becoming more complex. But with a new approach and better teamwork tools, that’s not slowing down their teams. “Our teams talk about Jira with a lot of passion and engagement,” says Felipe. “As Head of Transformation, that’s the best possible feedback. We don’t need to push people to use Jira and Confluence, because it’s genuinely bringing value.”