Reflections on Year One

Not that long ago I found myself looking for something more. Specifically, I was looking for a home where the work I did wasn’t just a job but a benefit to society, and at scale. Enter Walmart…I suppose you can say it was my calling.

I recently celebrated my one-year anniversary as a proud Walmart associate. Thinking back to my first day, I knew I’d be in for a wild, fulfilling ride. Little did I know, it would become the most challenging yet rewarding year of my entire career.

As I reflect on the past 365+ days, I can’t help but feel fortunate to work for such an innovative, determined, and resilient product team. The speed of changing customer expectations during this pandemic has kept us on our toes. However, the team’s discipline and commitment to our associates, customers and sellers fills me with so much confidence that we are creating winning outcomes for now and into the future. 

It hasn’t been easy, but if there’s one thing life has taught me it’s this– if it’s not challenging you it’s not changing you. Here are a few of my top takeaways from my first year at Walmart:

The work is truly purpose-driven

As the largest omnichannel retailer in America, we feel gratitude and responsibility knowing our decisions directly impact the lives of our 150 million weekly customers. One of our key product principles is to “make the customer successful.”

As the pandemic quickly encroached, we knew it was our responsibility to step up for our customers for one simple reason– it was the right thing to do. Even more, the decisions we needed to make as an organization during the height of the pandemic were easy because our purpose is clear – helping people save money so they can live better – not only in the best of times but especially in the difficult times.

When our customers needed pickup and delivery services, we rapidly increased slot capacity by 40% and did not stop there. When our customers wanted safer ways to interact, we made key services contact-free, including payment for SNAP purchases. And when customers needed items quickly, we launched two-hour Express Delivery, rolling the service out in nearly 2,500 US Walmart stores, reaching 60% of American households. That’s our culture.

The world’s largest retailer can move at the speed of a start-up — or faster

The only constant in retail is change. Walmart isn’t the company it was 60 years ago, and a decade from now it will be far more than what it is today. And evolution requires change.

I’ve had many opportunities throughout my career to learn how to implement corporate innovation– I’ve seen it be successful and I’ve seen it fail. While evolving the way you work as an organization is hard, the leadership team is committed to it at Walmart.

As we enhance our omnichannel shopping experiences, we’re creating a form of product management that is adapted for a massive enterprise that helps us develop solutions with high relevance, ease of use, and speed. We encourage associates to keep updating their beliefs, focus on solving the right problems, and innovate collaboratively to meet the ever-evolving needs of our associates, customers and sellers.

For example, last year we launched a new store concept that helps us facilitate out-of-the-box thinking in a live customer environment. These stores operate as all do with one distinct difference – they’re also used as a safe way to accelerate iterative problem solving, assimilating customer and associate feedback in real time.

Empowering people is paramount

The way I see it, what distinguishes great leadership from good leadership is the ability to be both humble and confident: by elevating the right voices, opinions, and ideas of teams who bring great experiences to life. Through our form of enterprise-level product management, we’ve developed a model that is empowering our associates to deliver best-in-class shopping, essential services, last mile fulfillment, seller experiences, and everyday associate experiences.

Given the size of the company and the number of teams it takes to bring one launch to life, we adopted the four-in-the-box (4ITB) approach, assembling the most important stakeholders across the business to collaborate on solutions to a defined problem. Key team members complete four quadrants of a box: Product Manager, Business, UX/Process Design, and Engineering. Each quadrant is responsible for decisions that fall within their area of expertise. Technology and customer (or seller) expectations are moving rapidly; with this model, we can think ahead and think bigger – winning first place consideration by addressing needs before our competition can, and better than they can. The product way of working is a force multiplier that will help us to make the moves that really count as one team — and already is.

Always be curious

Think back to the last time you discovered something surprising or unexpected. Did you want to learn more? That feeling is curiosity and, like any other skill, it requires nurturing over time. When you think something should be explored, follow that impulse and see where it leads. Hunches can often take you down new and rewarding paths.

But curiosity shouldn’t be mistaken for thoughtless action. Being curious means asking yourself, will this solution address the core problem? Design thinking — doing the right thing versus doing the things right, incorporating insights from different disciplines, rapid experiments to learn by co-creation with target end-users — is what matters.

That’s how our new augmented reality tool came to life. It was developed for associates to help them get product from the backroom to the floor faster. It stemmed from a problem that burdened our associates: individually scanning a tower of boxes to identify which ones needed to be taken to the sales floor. We knew we could make it faster and even make it a little fun by using augmented reality. In just a few short weeks, the teams tested and launched a new product where an associate simply holds up their device to see which boxes need removing. 

It’s been a year full of learnings, introspection, inspiration, and grit. We’ve advanced our company five years in five months out of necessity, something we never thought possible. And there’s no place I’d rather be than Walmart during this critical juncture because it has given me a home away from home, a place to meet and learn from associates who want to, first and foremost, scale our technology to benefit our society. And as our CEO Doug McMillon says, we’re just getting started…