Digital Commerce Re-Tales: Molly Schonthal

I’m “sort of like the Cruise Director for eCommerce.”

That’s the way Molly Schonthal, Vice President of Executive Strategy and Community at Salsify, describes her current gig. And if you’ve met her, then you know that Julie McCoy has nothing on her.?

“It is my job to build communities of like-minded execs to do group therapy, to share some of what's important and learn from each other.”?

In other words, she has a dream job at Salsify, where she’s at the helm of their mission to connect global organizations undergoing digital transformations through the Digital Shelf Institute’s Executive Forum.?

“If there's one thing that I've learned from working across so many customers…nobody has the silver bullet to any of this and the more we work together, and the more we share…the better.”

Molly has built a stellar reputation in CPG, eCommerce, and technology during her eight years at Nokia, nine years at Mars Wrigley, and now at Salsify. But her eCommerce journey wasn’t linear — much like many of the leaders we’ve interviewed in this series.?

She had a different path in mind initially, attending Northwestern University as an English lit major with a concentration in Victorian literature — “Which has an obvious tie to software,” she jokes.

Fresh out of college, looking for her next move, she was lured to consultancy.?

“Accenture, which was Andersen Consulting at the time, was hiring anybody with a pulse out of Northwestern who was interested in becoming a consultant. And the only thing I knew about consultancy is you got a credit card (I think it was a Diners Club Card), a rental car, and a hotel room. So I'm thinking, count me in, right? I just got out of college — I don't have money to buy pre-sliced fruit at Whole Foods. Do I want a new car every week? Yes. Do I want a room at the Marriott Residence Inn? Absolutely. Do I want my meals paid for from Monday through Friday? One hundred percent.”?

ERP transformation and SAP implementations were hot at the turn of the century, making them one of the biggest revenue streams for Accenture at the time.

“And so they’re taking people like me who know more about Charlotte Bronte than SQL, putting us in St. Charles, Illinois, for a week, training us how to test and code in SQL, and then sticking us on SAP implementation and charging a lot, right? That is how I got my start in technology.”?

Molly’s first official project was in change management, which presented more similarities between English lit and tech transformations than she expected.

“I was put inside a client who hired Accenture not only to run their SAP transformation from a technology point of view, but to also help them through what it meant around people and processes. And that is when I went, 'Oh my gosh, all the stuff I love about English literature.’ The big questions: Who am I? What do I stand for? What are the psychological implications of certain language that I'm using? What is the author's intent versus the character's intent versus the meta intent? All of those meaty problems in that psychology are inside technology transformations. You know, when you're moving a company from not having SAP to having SAP or not having Lotus to having Lotus or not having eCommerce to having eCommerce, they go through all of these amazing psychological transformations and they ask themselves these big questions all over again.”

Molly thrives off of solving technology projects as a part of successfully navigating broader organizational transformation.

“So creating supply as one operational motion and demand as another. And suddenly, you find yourself in the world of eCommerce, where supply and demand have a very tight relationship on the digital shelf. If you are out of stock, your SEO is plummeting…You're in the middle of a transformation that is scary and complex; that challenges traditional functional alignments. It challenges what we measure as success and is basically situated in a world of organizational chaos and all of that can be traced to wanting to merchandise your digital shelf. So I again have found a place where I'm smack dab in the middle of turmoil, which is candidly what I love. Like, find the most ambiguous, tumultuous situation. Drop me in and I'm like, ‘I've got my waders on’ and I can hatch myself to the tallest pull on the ship, you know, like Deadliest Catch style.”

This English lit major puts her love of language to use in helping organizations answer the tough questions that are plaguing them and their industries.?

“I think so often problems stay unsolvable or they don't progress because you don't have the vocabulary, the language to describe what it is, to form a common understanding. And we've all heard that adage 'Be careful of what you think because thoughts become words. Be careful of what you say because words turn into actions.' And I truly believe that around cultural change and transformation,...common language is a great point to begin the step through to action.”

Most recently, Molly has been tackling how to quantify the value of investment and content for the digital shelf.

Molly, on her professional passions and how to quantify the value of content for the digital shelf...

“I love that question because there's no one answer. There are a lot of right answers. And not every answer is right for every business situation. We are used to a world where there's a right way to do things. There's media key beliefs, there are your three P's, there are…these initials that stand for a process that we always follow so that no one does anything really stupid. Fast forward to the digital shelf and you've got marketing campaigns alongside shopper marketing campaigns along the black box environment and retailers. And you know that you need to invest in digital shelf content and the software infrastructure to facilitate its optimization, but you don't know exactly how to prove what this action of updating your content or creating your content is worth at a bottom-line value because there is no clear cut way for you to prove that to your organization.

You could look at changes in content and correlate that to changes in sales, but what about this promotion that you ran? You could correlate uplift in sales to a promotion you ran, but what about this change in the retail algorithm? And your company may be more interested in value growth or share growth, or you may be more interested in SKU growth. And all of these things can be specific. They can be specific to your company, its history and what it believes to be true currently. They can be specific to your category and the behavior that category has online and why and how people buy online and offline. They can be specific to the department you landed in if your digital shelf job is in an IT department versus a sales department versus a digital center of excellence.?

There's a ton of nuance and we're asking people to, you know, reactivate that creative problem-solving, nuanced brain that they may have put to hibernation several years ago when they left liberal arts and completely relied on organizational rules and agencies to solve all their problems.”?

On "what is good?"...

You can tell that Molly is nothing, if not intellectually curious, and much of that trait was formed by her upbringing, including being raised by a middle school teacher.?

“I'm a triplet. I have two twin brothers. We're fraternal, so three eggs for all of you science nerds out there. And we really couldn't be more different in terms of how we look and our personalities, but we also have a lot of similarities from being part of a common cohort. So my upbringing I would describe as eventful, right? It was my parents' first and last child and so everything was big. Us learning to walk was big. Us going to middle school was big. Us riding bikes was big. Us learning to drive was big.?

And there was a lot of chaos in my household. My mom was a middle school teacher, which perfectly qualified her for the job of raising a class of children, and she really did raise us as she would a kind of a classroom. We had what we would have argued at the time were the strictest parents in our town, but my mom had a structure for how things would go with three of us to handle. So this is what we're all doing. This is what we're all eating. This is the time you guys have a snack. Here's when we're all going to bed. And at one point we even had, and we laugh about this, The Schonthal Book of Rules, which exists somewhere, and it's hilarious.”?

Feeling like a member of a crowd while also striving to differentiate herself from that crowd equipped Molly with the ability to pave her own path professionally.

“I think that just always being with other people, having to deal with other people, different personalities, it was rarely WHAT I wanted to do that dictated the day, but more of a negotiation with a family dynamic. That has served me well being part of large organizations and now, more importantly, part of a software company in hypergrowth. Because there is never a clear right way. There's a lot of right ways. There's a lot of wrong ways. And there's a lot of things that are poorly defined, so you kind of have to just work it out.”?

Developing a strong sense of self has also served Molly well in establishing work-life boundaries.

“So, you will never find balance, and I stand by that. This idea of balance is sort of a fairytale. You will always feel like you're selling something short, either your professional life or your personal life. What I have learned more often, or more powerfully, as I get older and more senior in my career is putting yourself and your family first is never a bad idea. And if you compromise too much, say for example you're a highly professionally-identified person, you can sometimes make the mistake of giving too much of yourself to your job. You miss that one soccer game you really should have shown up for because that's going to make a difference and the call you took won't [in 10 years]. And you do that and you do that again, and then you start to harbor resentment for your professional self or your company when it was really up to you to create that boundary.

Everyone is always going to be asking for more. And if you don't have the sense of self to shut the darn thing down, walk away from it, know that you're never going to get through it and feed your life, then I think it's a slippery slope. So I just have really strong boundaries around stuff I do and don't do in terms of professional sacrifice that interferes with the growth of my family.”

On the "fairytale" of work-life balance...

Molly makes up for the elusive balance between her professional and personal life by savoring time at home with her family of three (singer-songwriter Trina Hamlin and their son). Chocolate chip pancakes and afternoon naps are both “delicious” weekend staples.

“So my wife and I bought this house that was built in 1890 up here in the northwest corner of Connecticut, and it had zero curb appeal and people were kind of scared to touch it. And my wife has done an amazing job of working with local contractors and spent eight months turning this house into a place that we could move right into…We're one of those pandemic stories where we left the city and came out here. And I sort of love our household dynamic with one creative person and one business person because I think Trina brings to me the part of me that I left behind when I took the ‘Diners Club Card.’ I feel there's another sliding door life where I am some professor at an all women's college, and I only wear sustainable clothing and I have six cats and I make my own hummus. That's also in me somewhere.”?

Molly also believes that in order to do your best work, you must separate yourself from it—advice she received early in her career and solidified through her years of experience.

“I left Nokia and went to Mars Wrigley when I was at the Senior Manager level. My last conversation at Nokia was with our department director at the time. I said to her, 'Look, do you have any words of advice for me? Things that I could be doing better based on what you've observed?' And I was still at the age where I would say those things, but I didn't really want to hear what people had to say. What I wanted her to say was, 'No, Molly. You're perfect. Enjoy your next job.' So she said to me, ironically, 'You need to stop taking work so personally.' And I remember saying, 'Oh, thank you for the advice.' But I'm thinking, 'WTF?! I am good because I take this s-word personally. You wouldn't have gotten the performance if I didn't take this personally. You want me to take this personally. That is my M.O. I take work personally. I live work.'?

And so I walked away kind of thinking, 'Well, that's some bad advice.' But, you know, having had the benefit of many years after that to reflect on her advice, she was spot on. I was over-identifying with my professional point of view or my strategies and not giving myself the space to go, 'OK, this is work. This is an opinion.' If someone is in conflict with that opinion or thinks that it can be augmented, we are talking about the thing and not about me and I am short-selling my own capacity by not having the space to listen to other opinions or I'm tripping myself up by being too precious about my own ideas. And I do need to care a little bit less. Care less so that I can do better work. So that the work I do is just that. It's work. And yes, I bring all my Molly quirkiness to it, but I'm not so identified with it that I can't see the fault in it or I can't see other perspectives, or I can't see that maybe I should not be doing what I'm doing.?

And so upon retrospect, that is advice that I have exercised more and more over the years… because it's also just so much more enjoyable when you've separated who you are from the work that you're doing, even though you can still take it personally. You can still put passion into it, but it's not you. Like your PowerPoint is not you. Your email is not you.”?