This week on the podcast Matt sits down with Tom Ward, EVP and Chief eCommerce Officer of Walmart U.S. They discuss a variety of topics starting with what Tom does in his current role and his past experience in customer product management. They then delve deeper into product management with the idea that product management is really problem solving at the deepest level. Tom touches on how Walmart is solving a variety of problems for customers to create a seamless, personalized shopping experience whether they are shopping in-store or online. They finish the discussion with Tom sharing what he looks for in future associates who would like to join his team.

When we say no, the nearest Walmart to our customers

is the is the one in their pocket. It's the app. And

everyone always says, huh, okay, so when you think about that app

as a store is the closest store, it's also the biggest store.

Excellence, professionalism, innovation and

collegiality. These are the values the Sam M. Walton College

of Business explores in education, business and the

lives of people we meet every day. I'm Matt Waller, Dean of

the Walton College and welcome to the Be Epic Podcast. I have

with me today, Tom Ward, who's EVP, and Chief Ecommerce Officer

of Walmart US. Thank you so much, Tom, for joining me today.

I really appreciate it.

Ya know, you bet. Thanks for having us on.

Tom, you're Chief Ecommerce Officer at Walmart US,

that sounds like a really interesting title. What do you

do in that role?

Well, it's a great question, Matt, we we have a

really simple task, which is how do we bring together physical

and digital assets in a way that helps customers save time and

money. And ultimately, you know, live better so so my role really

is to make sure that all the omnichannel capabilities that

we've built over the last few years, connect really well to

our digital store, and can be fulfilled through our physical

footprint in a way that makes sense for customers.

Tom, you've had an amazing career, you've been SVP

of Last Mile, In Home, AV, EV, and Drones. And you've been SVP

of Customer Product. And before I go further on your experience,

when people hear customer product, many of them think that

that's talking about just products like that are on the

shelves, what does product mean, at Walmart?

Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I think it's, it's

really common. In fact, I remember getting that role,

Matt, and it was kind of interesting people like, oh,

products, like buying things right to your point and, and

selection. But in reality product and product management

is is it's kind of a skill and a way of working in business. And

it's about solving problems. I think if I boiled it down to its

simplest terms, you know, product management is problem

solving. And you can't do anything on your own in Walmart.

And I think that's probably true of everywhere. And so we use a

four in the box framework for product management, that

includes a business leader that brings a problem, a product

manager that helps the business understand what that problem is

and how they might solve it. A technology leader that might

build that solution and a designer that helps bring the

solution to life in a way that makes sense for the end user.

And that might be an internal or an external customer. And so

when you use the four in the box and use product management,

there's a really cool saying that we like to share at

Walmart, which is to fall in love with the problem, and not

the solution. And what that does is it opens up the mind to say,

if you're trying to solve somebody's problem, everything's

on the table. If you went to a solution, you tend to start

reinforcing that same solution and you you iterate on the same

solution or you defend the same solution. And that might not be

right. It might have been right once, but it might not be right,

you know, going forward. And so fall in love with problems, not

solutions and working with a four in the box are kind of the

key tenants to product management.

Very succinct. Thank you. For students

listening. We have something called the McMillon Innovation

Studio, where companies bring problems to the students and

they work in cross functional teams to solve the problems and

they focus a lot on problems. They interview lots of

customers. They do something called empathy mapping, customer

empathy mapping, they learn how to use Agile and other

techniques. I, but the students that have come out of there, I

I mean, I think I think it's a framework for

know you all have hired a number of students that have come

through that that program but we're always trying to improve

the degree to which we're incorporating product. I

remember Doug McMillon several years ago, before we started the

McMillon Innovation Studio, asked us to ramp that capability

up and we've been trying to ramp it further and further every

year. It is interesting this idea of falling in love with the

problem I think about some of the greatest inventors and

scientists in history, they clearly had fallen in love with

the problem. Because they tried so many empirical methods of and

they had lots of failures and trying to find the solution.

When you look at that four in the box, I've not heard that

before. Maybe our studio has I mean, I don't teach in the

studio. But which of those do you feel is the most challenging

to incorporate in the in the group in solving the problem?

approaching, approaching the product way of working. And the

hardest part I often see Matt is is getting a really good problem

statement, and tends to be the problem statement is owned by

the business. Because they're the ones obviously running the

the function or the the area that's, that's under question.

And so business leaders tend to say, here's the thing that I

need you to go build me. And that's a solution, not a

problem. And it sounds really simple to say, well just tell us

what you're trying to solve. And folks will say, well, I'm trying

to do this one thing, and it's going to connect to this, and I

needed to do that. And it's really hard for business leaders

to zoom out and stand back to say, what's the actual problem

that you're trying to solve the problem statement's, the most

important part. And then once you've got that problem

statement clarified, let the product team then the technology

team and the engineering partners and designers bring the

business working alongside the business different solutions

that they might not have arrived that had they just gone down a

path that was more specific. So it sounds really simple. But the

hardest part is defining the problem statement. And once

you've defined it, we tend to find that the solutions can come

in all different shapes and sizes, and might be much more

involved than than was once thought.

Yeah because some solutions may technically be

feasible. But when it comes to, for example, getting store

associates to roll it out, it might be challenging because of

the tenure of store associates or the experience. Do you have

to take those kinds of things into account when evaluating

solutions?

Yeah, I think I think the way that I would think about

it is, you know, the best solutions, you mentioned

different innovators and different technologies across

the the industry in the landscape. Matt, the best

solutions to problems don't need any training. They're intuitive,

right? They the heuristics of the solution is so clear, and so

obvious that the user can't help but succeed. And so if you

remove friction from people's lives, whether they're customers

or whether their associates, you're going to make their lives

better, you're going to improve the task, you're going to help

them solve the problem. That was part of your statement. But

doing so means that it should be intuitive, it should make sense.

It shouldn't need an instruction manual. And it should flow and

it should be easier to get the solution right and wrong. These

are the kinds of things that as you're working through a design

in a four in a box as a product leader, that you that you think

about, because they're what you see in your everyday lives. If

you start solutioning, then you tend to start to explain how to

use the solution that you propose in and then you run up

against this opportunity, which is, how do you do that on a

grand scale? How do you do it quickly? And how do you make it

sustainable? Whether you're first day in Walmart, or whether

you've been here for 20 or 30 years, we want these things to

be just as intuitive and just as straightforward for everyone.

When did you first start getting interested in

product management product?

I mean, I think we sort of shifted our ways of

working. So we might have thought it through a project

lens once upon a time. But product management is about

customer and associate solutions. And so as we're

building an omni channel business, it involves bringing

together lots of different things. You know, we have an

E-commerce business that ships things to home. We have a store

business, obviously in a Neighborhood Markets and our

Supercenters, but we have lots of solutions that connect those

two things together. And that requires an understanding of the

mission of customers on and that leads you to a product mindset

in order to meet those challenges.

This reminds me as you've been talking, I'm a bit

older than you and I I came out of the Quality Management area a

long time ago and And it reminds me, there's a concept called

Poka Yoke, that is a Japanese concept. And it means idiot

proof. And basically, it's like in manufacturing, you know, a

jig, there may be a million ways to put a jig on but if you could

make it only one way to go on, then you don't have to worry

about it being done improperly. There's the seven why's where

you say, the problem is this. Why does this problem why why

why? Why? Why? You know, they say if you get down to the

seventh why you're starting to understand the problem a little

bit better. But it forces you to think through it.

Yeah, and I think that's that's that point. And

maybe it's seven why's or other reasons, but that's why the you

know, it's definitely the hardest thing in product

management is defining a clear problem statement.

So, Tom, you're on the board of Walmex. Which is

Walmart, Mexico, is that correct?

Yes, it's publicly traded in Mexico. Yes. So I'm a

board member, I get to, you know, take part in those those

meetings and help that team think through what will make

sense for their business.

I'm on some boards, and many boards don't have

people with product experience, like you do, I can just see how

having you on a board might be really helpful, in part because

of your product expertise. Are you able to use that in the

board setting?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, product product

mindset is probably the best way of thinking about it, Matt. You

know, it's helpful to have a product mindset. But really,

when you say that what you're talking about is a, you're

looking to solve problems. So I like to, I like to simplify it a

little bit. And I think if we if we help grow and develop talent,

you know, in our teams that are looking at where are the pain

points for customers, and where the pain points for associates,

and often in retail, those things tend to be very common.

There's obviously lots of nuances, but there's generally

speaking, folks that are trying to, you know, feed themselves or

trying to get access to items that they need, and they want

services alongside those items. And, you know, they want to

access them seamlessly, depending on what kind of day

they're having and where they are, you know, in that

lifecycle, those things are pretty common. And so if you

focus on problem solving, that tends to lead you to a, you

know, a product ways of working, that you can help build really

effective solutions.

Tom, I'd like to switch gears just a little bit

here. It would be great if you could talk a little bit about

the third party marketplace. And you know, if you wouldn't mind

explaining it a little bit to to the audience. That'd be great.

But also talk about progress you've made term in terms of

maybe assortment, onboarding sellers, advertising, order

fulfillment, with Walmart Connect, Walmart Fulfillment

Services, etc. That'd be great.

Yeah, sure. So so maybe we talk about, you know,

our assortment and E-commerce. So we like to have fun with

people when we say where's the nearest Walmart? Customers

always say, especially around here, you know, my Northwest

Arkansas, people will say, oh, I know where it is. It's right

down here. It's on the left here. And then you, you know,

you turn right, and it's there. And we say no, nearest Walmart

to our customers is the is the one in their pocket. It's the

app. And everyone always says, huh, okay, so when you think

about that app, as a store as the closest store, it's also the

biggest store. And I don't have the same physical constraints

that I had when I was a store manager, where there's a limit

to how many things you can put on the shelves, because you

know, the shelves have a have a physical end, whereas online,

they don't, you know, you can house all the items that the

customer could could want to find in a shelf that that's

never ending. And that's really where the distinction between

owned inventory owned merchandise that we you know, we

buy we have merchant teams buying for our shelves and for

our fulfillment centers. And then we have a marketplace,

which is an open space that we can bring sellers that want to

put their item in front of customers. And they can use the

traffic that we have come in through Walmart to help grow

that business. And it's great for customers because it means

they get access to 10s of millions of items that they need

when when they search for them. But it comes with a couple of

really important points, which is when you open the search bar

in the Walmart Experience, the search bar is working on behalf

of the customer. So the search bar wants to do the best job of

returning the most relevant item to the customer, depending on

what it is they look for, sometimes that's a really

generic term. And sometimes it's really specific. So as we grow

our marketplace, and we have these millions of items in these

endless aisles, the likelihood that we can solve a customer's

problem, when they challenge us in that search bar grows and

grows, and that builds trust with our customers. And it means

that, you know, when they're looking to solve something,

whether it's a, you know, perishable grocery order in 60

minutes through express, whether it's, you know, a Christmas item

that they need to pick up curbside at a store, or maybe

it's a really specific item for a car, or, you know, a crafting

request that we carry in our marketplace, and we can deliver

that to them. You know, a couple of days later, the Walmart app,

the closest store starts to become this, all in one solution

for our customers in the marketplace plays a really big

role in that.

Tom, this is a relatively I mean, Walmart has

been ecommerce for a long time, but still, it's a big

philosophical shift, you know, from focusing just on brick and

mortar stores. And of course, I know, I know, Walmart's made a

huge amount of progress. But I would think that change

management is a key part of your job as well, to drive these

changes, is that right?

Yeah, I think, look, the yo u know, we've got this

incredible legacy, haven't we of the, you know, 60 years plus of

being this solution for customers, and I think the, the

way our assets come together, is evolving. And, and the

expectations that customers have are evolving even faster.

There's a great saying Matt, which is loyalty and retail is

the absence of something better. And if you think about that,

what it means is that the customers last best experience

is their new expectation. You know, once people came to

stores, then they pick things up, now they want them

delivered. The reality is customers want choice. And we

want to help activate that choice. And so the way you do

that is you bring the footprint together in a way that hides all

of the plumbing that hides all of the connection points that

live behind the scenes and present in a way that is

seamless to the customer. So customers love shopping in our

Super Centers, you know, especially at this time of year

and seasonal times a year mark, there's no way better to walk in

and you know, see everything that we've got going on. They

love our neighborhood markets, because they're really

convenient. They love our pickup business, because if they don't

have time to go inside, they can swing by and pick things up

curbside, you know, increasing the especially during the

pandemic, delivery played a really important role. People

want speed. So we built propositions like express

delivery, to help meet those customer needs, you know,

especially if you've forgotten something, it's a great

solution. And then we have really cutting edge technologies

that we're experimenting with to like drone delivery and

autonomous vehicle delivery that, you know, really start to

bend people's expectations of what they can get, and in what

timeframe. But when you add all that, together, you've got this

seamless connection between our physical store and our digital

store. And so from a change management perspective, you

know, the role that our store managers play today is evolved.

When I was a store manager, all the customers that that we

served came through our front door and they stood right in

front, you could see them, you know, the majority of customers

obviously come to our stores still, but increasingly, they're

also coming to our digital store and the store managers

fulfilling that order, you know, online they're dispensing

through the curbside through the front door, their loading

packages into drones in this local area, for example. And

it's really changing the way that people see the role.

There's really transforming the way customers experience

Walmart.

How is Walmart listening to customers and

responding to improve the shopping experience?

Yeah, we spend a lot of time looking at customers

feedback. And you know, the great thing about Walmart is we

have so many transactions, we see so many customers in so many

channels, that we can help present the opportunity for

customers to share what's important to them. You know,

Matt, maybe I'll point at one example during the pandemic

because it's a good one, which was, you know, who'd have

thought that the best way to receive a delivery would be

contactless, right, leave it on my doorstep. And I'll come and

get it when I'm when I'm ready. But almost overnight, that

became an expectation from customers. They told us they

don't want to interact with people. They didn't want to pull

up curbside and sign a, you know, an electronic keypad, they

wanted the associate to do it for them because they didn't

want to roll the windows down and we wanted to keep our

associates safe too. And so when you focus on the problem that

needed to be solved, which was how do you receive items that

you bought online, whether it's curbside or whether it's on the

doorstep, contactless, that's a perfect problem statement for a

team to go away and solve. And we did that really fast. And so

we'll take cues from customers, we'll understand the way they

receive and experience. And if customers tell us they like what

they see, then we're probably going to do a lot more of it,

then we'll keep iterating on it. And if customers say, hey, this

makes things challenging for me, then that becomes the problem

statement that we put back into that four in the box and back

into that product way of working.

So Tom, one thing that I've been told that you

have worked a lot on is simplifying shopping. You know,

looking at how Walmart is making the shopping experience fast,

seamless, personalized, no matter who the customers or, no

matter how the customers or members choose to shop. How have

you gone about leading this simplification?

Yeah, but I think for me, simplification involves

removing friction. So, you know, I think about our journey, Matt,

we once had two apps. We had an orange app, that was what we

used to call our online grocery pickup app. And then we had a

blue app that was the gateway to Walmart.com. Just over a year

ago, we said, we should bring these experiences together.

Because what we were doing was we were we were kind of showing

our organizational structure to our customers, we were saying,

hey, if you want to shop with this orange team, then you can

buy groceries and consumables, and you can pull up curbside at

one of our stores. And we'll bring those out to you. But if

you wanted to buy something from our marketplace, and have it

delivered to your home, then you had to go through the blue

doorway, and you work with this blue app team. And we'd ship

that to you in a box and it felt disconnected. It didn't feel

simple to the customer. Because the ultimate convenience for

Walmart is that you could buy bread, milk, eggs, and a really

obscure longtail collectible item from our marketplace. And

you could do it all in one transaction. And we should bring

it to you either all at once or you know within one series of

deliveries. And that wasn't the way we were showing up. And so

we decided to bring those two experiences together. And that's

a good example of how we're focused on removing friction and

simplifying the experience. And that reveals lots of other

things that we then need to go and work on that continues to

refine that simplification and remove that friction.

Okay, Tom, what are you looking for? In you know,

there's, there's probably people out there students and alumni

and various people that would like to move in this direction

in their career. What do you and your team look for in people?

Yeah, it's a great question, Matt, I think first

thing I'm gonna say is that Walmart is a fantastic place to

have this kind of career, you know, you listed off a couple of

roles I've been fortunate to have here. And I started like

running running stores in the UK and then spent time in

international and I got to work in different areas there,

including strategy. And then I got to work on our training

academies and simplification for stores, and then our online

pickup business and product organization through to this

role in overall e-comm, Matt. So, so I'm always going to be a

huge advocate for the kind of breadth of opportunity that

Walmart can present to somebody. But I think if you think what's

consistent across all those roles, and what makes the

difference for folks that we interview, people are gonna have

different qualifications and different skills. But the the

thing that stands out to me is always the curiosity. Because I

think if you're going to solve problems, not just the problems

that customers and associates face today, but once they're

going to face tomorrow, and if you're going to understand that

you've got to see past solutioning, to find that pure

problem statement, to remove friction and to, to get on to

the next thing. You've got to start from a place of curiosity.

So it's really important for us as we meet people to think

through the breadth of interest they have the way that they look

through, you know, different lenses to view the world because

that tends to land you in a place that you might not have

expected. And it brings together a really great solution for

customers and associates. So that for me is a really

important quality.

Well, Tom, congratulations on your amazing

career and the tremendous accomplishments and work you're

doing at Walmart. It's really impressive and I know you're

very busy. So it's very generous of you to take time to visit

with us. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks for kind words, Matt, and really

appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.

On behalf of the Sam M. Walton College of

Business, I want to thank everyone for spending time with

us for another engaging conversation. You can subscribe

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