Leaders of Change: Hannah Donoghue

HANNAH DONOGHUE is the VP of Global Advisory at Edge by Ascential? (formerly Brand View, Clavis Insight, One Click Retail and PlanetRetail RNG) delivering some of the industry’s most accurate and actionable sales-driving data, insights and advisory solutions for global brands and retailers looking to win in today’s ecommerce-driven world.

She leads the Edge by Ascential? advisory business, providing in-depth consultancy and thought leadership to leading global retailers, manufacturers and service providers on the key disruptors of the retail landscape and the critical capabilities their organizations will need for sustained growth. 

Why did you choose to pursue eCommerce in your career? I love the pace of change in eCommerce – it is moving so quickly and you can’t ever be complacent if you’re working in eCommerce. You are challenged to constantly learn & innovate, which inspires me every day. 

Our company always seeks to stay ahead of the changes in the retail landscape so that we can best support our clients. eCommerce has and will continue to redefine the global retail landscape so it really wasn’t a question for us – we had to be deeply involved in eCommerce.

What is your biggest strength, and how have you used it for your success in eCommerce? I think my biggest strength is my curiosity and passion for learning. I’m always asking why something is happening and not stopping until I figure out the root cause of the change. Every day I wake up hoping to learn something new.

What is the weirdest skill or talent to come in handy in your eCommerce experience? I’m a bit of a numbers geek – I love digging into huge excel files to find the trends and can’t stop searching until I find the pattern. This has helped me over the years with the different analysis that we prepare for our clients on market opportunities. We start with our massive database and then have to find and pull out the right numbers as it pertains to that client’s market, business model, etc. For me, that’s a fun puzzle to solve.

How have you most successfully influenced change within your organization (or with your clients)? When I first started with my organization, it was a small 10 person start-up, and now we’re part of a much larger global organization. Through the evolution, I’ve encouraged my team to embrace change as a great learning opportunity and most importantly, focus on how we can continuously evolve and change to best support our clients. It sounds a bit cliché, but I also try to influence change simply by leading by example.

With our clients, we influence change by providing actionable, data-driven insights and best practice inspiration from our global analyst team’s research. We also influence change by connecting eCommerce practitioners through our share groups and events.

In the last five years, what new belief, behavior or habit has most improved your life? Building in breaks to clear my head when I’m working on a challenging project has really helped me. Even if it’s just a 15-minute walk outside by our office in Boston or around the UCLA campus where we run some of our programs, the answers or at least ways to determine the answers always seem clearer after that.

I’ve also had the fortune of traveling to many amazing countries for work and over the past 5 years, I’ve really tried to at least take a quick walk outside to really get a feel for a market. I love doing store tours in new markets – you can really get a sense of the retail environment just by spending time in stores taking in everything around you. The best way to really get a sense of what’s going on in the market is to actually get out there and experience it yourself – and its much harder to do that from the airport, hotel or a conference room. At least at this point, my family has gotten used to extended trips to the store because I wander off to look at different displays or new innovation…it makes weekly grocery shopping more fun, or at least for me ??  

What are you learning right now? I’m learning a lot right now about the last mile fulfillment industry. It is clear that winners and losers will be dictated by their supply chains, and most notably their fulfillment capabilities. As eCommerce continues to take share globally, retailers and manufacturers will need advanced supply chain capabilities.

What are the 1-3 songs that would make up your career soundtrack today?

• With a Little Help From My Friends by The Beatles: One of my favorite parts of my job has been growing a team and recruiting really smart, motivated and passionate individuals to help our clients. I’m a firm believer that we provide our clients with the best recommendations when we combine the expertise of our team – everyone comes with their own perspective that together is really powerful. I have the opportunity to work with some of the most talented individuals within our organization and at our clients’ organization, who I learn from constantly, and that makes every day that much more enjoyable. 

What are the 1-3 books you’ve gifted the most or that have greatly influenced your life, and why?

• High Output Management by Andrew Grove: This was recently recommended to me and it has quickly influenced my day-to-day work. It provided helpful frameworks to organize work and ways to support the development of any team. I appreciate how practical it is, taking more complex concepts and simplifying them down to the key elements to make them immediately actionable.

If you could have a gigantic billboard for the world to see with anything on it, what would it say, and why? It would either be “If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else” or “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. Everyone is busy and has their own priorities, but I think the first quote highlights that personal fulfillment and happiness can even more so come from helping others rather than just focusing on what you need to get done personally.

For the 2nd one, it’s important to strive towards excellence, but not let that get in the way of progress. We’re at a point in time where quick, strategic testing and learning is critical to innovation and if you wait too long to test out an idea until its perfect, you can miss your window of opportunity. 

What are the worst recommendations or advice you have heard related to eCommerce?  “eCommerce is just another channel” and “eCommerce is so small right now and there will be plenty of time to focus on it later once it's bigger”. eCommerce can’t be treated as just another channel and the pace of change has never been greater. If you don’t start acting on it now, by the time you do, it will be too late.

What advice would you give to a future leader of change about to enter business, or specifically the eCommerce field? Try to learn something new every day and stay positive when you hit roadblocks. Always surround yourself with others that know more than you on different topics – that way you can all grow together. Finding networks of people that are facing similar challenges to you, perhaps in a different category, can drive new ideas for you to implement in your business.

And finally, don’t lose sight of the consumer – it’s easy to get caught up in all the change and rumored change on a daily basis. Make sure that what you’re doing works customer back. 

What specific, industry-related change do you believe will happen that few others seem to see? Given the changes in the landscape, I think we are in a new world of co-opetition, where partnerships that wouldn’t have happened in the past are now the norm. I see partnerships happening in a few areas. The first is platform partnerships, which will continue to increase as retailers need to have their own platform or be on another retailers’. O2O partnerships will continue as well as everyone looks to be as close to the consumer as possible.

The new supply chain and fulfillment requirements are also having a major effect on retailer and manufacturer economics. There will be more consolidation in the last mile fulfillment space and more scaled supply chain partnerships in order to scale the gap to profitability.

Globally, we’re also starting to see more partnerships between marketplaces and traditional retail (independents and mom & pops). Marketplace operators like Amazon, Alibaba and JD can bring their analytics, technologies, and broader capabilities to modernize the traditional trade, while extending their own reach and proximity to customers. As these partnerships scale globally, it has the potentially to completely reshape the retail landscape structure in emerging markets and will impact manufacturers’ relationships and influence over traditional retail.

What is the last thing you bought online, and why? The last items I bought online were gifts for a baby shower. I wanted to put together a basket of gifts for my family member and I knew I wasn’t going to have time to go to the mall (nor did I want to). I wanted to be able to shop a broader range of baby clothes and toys so I could pick out a few special outfits without the annoyance of going to multiple stores to see if the style or size that I wanted was there. I knew searching for and finding what I wanted would be much easier online than in-store.

Outside of that, I’ve had a constant flow of boxes coming to my house for our wedding next month. Last week, our foyer looked like a fulfillment center since I had 5+ pairs of shoes shipped to my house, and fortunately Zappos and Nordstrom make returns and exchanges easy ??.

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Leaders of Change is a weekly interview series featuring select industry pioneers who are driving the evolution of commerce, the consumer and everything in between. If you would like to recommend a Leader of Change for consideration, please reach out to me on LinkedIn.