Walmart, Inc. / My Work

My Work

Background

Sam’s Club is a membership-funded, retail warehouse chain of clubs, which are owned and operated by Walmart Inc. and was founded by Sam Walton in 1983. There are approximately 600 club and distribution centers and approximately 100,000 employees around the globe.

My Club is an existing metrics app within the Sam’s Club ecosystem of 46 mobile applications. The My Work initiative had 3 primary objectives:

• Integrating other existing applications into the My Club app, so that all associates would begin their day in this app.

• A radical redesign of an application which was already a reskin of a reskin, for scalability. New features and enhancements driven by the enrichment of data provided through artificial intelligence and machine learning would be leveraged to provide task prioritization.

• Reduce operating costs with a projected savings of $300 million over the next 5 years. Reduce the rate of turnover for associates within the initial 90 days of hire. Provide an experience that delights the users, as “Happy Associates = Happy Members”. 

BUSINESS GOALs

Reduce operating costs with a projected savings of $350 million over the next 5 years. Reduce the rate of turnover for associates within the initial 90 days of hire. Provide an experience that delights the users, as “Happy Associates = Happy Members”. 

DESIGN GOALS + CHALLENGES

SUCCESS METRIC

1 year: Pilot in 10 clubs by the start of FY2023. Launch MVP at chain Q2 2023.
5 year: Review operational savings YOY

STAKEHOLDERS

THE LEGACY APPLICATION

The legacy application was a lift and shift from a reskin. 

To ensure this would not be a disjointed experience and because of the enormity of the project, my recommendation was a phased approach, where no throwaway work would be produced. MVP would involve a retooled dashboard and the elements that would add delight along the way.

ITERATE, VALIDATE, RINSE and REPEAT

Of the above challenges, the safety of our designers, researcher and associates was of the utmost importance to me and we frequently were at the mercy of COVID-19 guidelines. However, our incredibly dedicated researcher traveled across state lines and all over the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex on a weekly basis for the team to make continuous improvements to the product.

In addition, I worked closely with Engineering leads and developers to ensure that aspects of delight were present throughout the application, but were lightweight lifts. For example, the Director of Content Strategy and I discussed potential animations, akin to the confetti explosion when a congratulatory message is sent in iMessage. After scouring the internet for a package, I was able to source 1 package that was potentially viable for the Engineering team to implement. However, the developers in my brain trust determined it would not have the desired effect on iOS, but would be acceptable on Android. Therefore, a workaround was needed. At the end of the day, this workaround was visualized using animated gifs: foam fingers rising and falling, confetti shooting out of a party horn, or an associate cheering an associate on with fist pumping in the air. The deep saturated colors are intentional.

Delivery is also another key element to ensure what’s designed is what’s produced. Working alongside the Engineering team, I dug in deep to ensure that what I was producing was valuable and encapsulated all of the use cases. I find myself fortunate to have picked up a bit of React Native as a new side hobby.

OUTCOME

In a remarkable 9 short months, despite all of the churn and gaps, design standards for the app had been set and reusable components created, so that future enhancements were only a feature flag away. MVP had been released within 6 months.