Walmart created a brand new organisation (Walmart Labs) in California to develop a global, multi-tenant and multi-currency e-commerce platform. I joined a group of c.25 senior leaders who were tasked to create the new organisation and develop a first MVP e-commerce platform.
We decided to focus on grocery home shopping - as this is the most complicated customer journey (due to the logistics of picking and delivering chilled and frozen goods in a defined time slot).
I recruited an initial team of Product Managers and UX Designers (in US and UK) and set about defining functional and experience design for all capabilities across the platform. This included content and product information management, authentication, e-store, promotions, payment gateways, checkout, route scheduling, order management, store pick tools and contact centre applications.
We brought in a system integrator from India and over the next 12 months, my team directed the build of a multi-language, multi-currency e-commerce platform. At peak, we had over 200 engineers across 3 time zones, with agile development and customer-centred design critical to our success.
