Building a Digital Farm: The John Deere Website Redesign

The Challenge: A Digital Gateway for the People Who Keep the World Running
For generations, John Deere has been synonymous with reliability. Farmers, contractors, and landowners trust its machines to work as hard as they do. But in 2017, the company faced a new challenge: its website wasn’t keeping up.

Customers weren’t sitting at desks—they were out in the fields, on job sites, making split-second decisions about equipment, repairs, and dealers. They needed a website that worked the way they did: fast, intuitive, and always within reach.

John Deere’s mission was clear: redesign the website to be as dependable as the machines it sold.

But building a digital experience for the physical world wasn’t going to be easy. It required bridging legacy systems with modern UX, making information accessible in low-connectivity rural areas, and ensuring a flawless rollout without disrupting daily operations.

That’s where I came in.

The Build: Ensuring a Flawless Digital Foundation
As Associate Director of QA at Digitas, I led the quality assurance efforts and stakeholder engagement to ensure that every part of the new website worked exactly as John Deere’s customers needed it to.

📍 Leading a Global QA Team
🔹 Managed onshore and offshore QA engineers to provide 24/7 testing coverage, keeping pace with the project’s aggressive timeline.
🔹 Created structured workflows to keep John Deere’s business teams, developers, and testing teams aligned.

📍 Turning Stakeholders into Digital Experts
One of the biggest challenges was guiding non-technical stakeholders through the testing process. I worked closely with John Deere’s leadership, product owners, and IT teams to:
✅ Translate complex QA processes into actionable insights for business leaders.
✅ Host regular status meetings to ensure transparency around testing outcomes and key risks.
✅ Lead User Acceptance Testing (UAT), giving John Deere’s internal teams the tools to evaluate and approve site functionality.

📍 On-Site Training in Moline, IL
🚜 John Deere’s headquarters in Moline, Illinois, became my home base as I worked directly with internal teams, training them on:
✅ UAT methodologies—empowering non-technical teams to test effectively.
✅ Issue escalation processes—ensuring smooth communication between business teams, developers, and QA engineers.
✅ Real-world testing—verifying the site under the same conditions its customers would use it in.

📍 End-to-End Testing for a Seamless Experience
🔹 Navigation & Product Discovery – Ensured the site was intuitive for farmers, contractors, and dealers.
🔹 Mobile Optimization & Cross-Device Testing – Verified seamless performance across smartphones, tablets, and desktops, ensuring usability even in the middle of a field.
🔹 Performance & Load Testing – Simulated high-traffic periods to ensure no slowdowns, no outages—just reliability.
🔹 Accessibility Compliance – Validated that the site met ADA standards, making it inclusive for all users.

Overcoming Roadblocks: From Testing Fields to Digital Fields
💡 Bridging the Gap Between Business & Tech – QA is more than testing—it’s translation. I created structured workflows, clear reporting processes, and hands-on training to align business teams, developers, and QA engineers.

💡 Training Stakeholders on UAT – John Deere’s business teams were experts in agriculture, not website testing. I transformed their expertise into actionable testing skills, ensuring they could confidently validate site functionality.

💡 Optimizing for Rural Users – Many customers accessed John Deere’s site from the middle of a field. I led real-world connectivity testing to ensure fast load times and smooth performance, even in low-bandwidth areas.

The Results: A Website as Reliable as a John Deere Tractor
🚀 Seamless, Bug-Free Deployment – A smooth launch with no major defects or usability concerns.
📱 On-the-Go Access for Farmers & Contractors – A mobile-optimized experience that works where customers work.
📈 Stakeholder Confidence in the Platform – By training internal teams on UAT, we ensured a successful launch with full business alignment.
🛠 Faster Equipment Selection & Dealer Access – A streamlined site that made it easier for customers to find the right machines, compare models, and locate dealers.

John Deere doesn’t just build machines—it builds legacies. And now, its website does the same.

Why This Was One of My Favorite Projects
This wasn’t just a website redesign—it was a digital transformation for a legendary brand.

✔️ It was about understanding the customer, not just the code.
✔️ It was about teaching stakeholders to test like engineers and aligning teams from different worlds.
✔️ It was about making technology invisible—so that a farmer in the middle of nowhere could get the information they needed without a second thought.

Technology should never get in the way of work that matters. And thanks to our efforts, John Deere’s customers can focus on what they do best—keeping the world running.