At Walmart, we always hear propaganda like "If we're gonna compete with Amazon... [insert BS phrase about tech/software we are incapable of writing]" It seems our leadership sees Amazon as our mortal enemies. Are we? What propaganda does Amazon pass around the inside? Who does Amazon see as its number one competitor? For many of the engineers that work here, WM tech is shit because our devs are shit because we are not a tech company and don't spend resources on good tech - we are brick-and-morter retail/grocery. If we wanted to be a tech company, we would have never bought OneOps đđ. IMO Amazon is a tech company at it's core due to AWS and software quality being the foundation. As a result of that foundation, Amazon is poised to impact retail and logistics sooner than WM that is stuck in the dark ages of tech.
Wouldnât say a joke but we donât really discuss the competition. Lately Iâve had a few casual discussions about googleâs shopping feature in terms of UX but thatâs about it.
Interesting. Well we mention Amazon every company meeting it seems. Apparently we're jealous of ur sick heelys and beyblades... and ur cloud infrastructure
Every meeting mentioning Amazon at Walmart. Why? I don't think I ever hear of Walmart. Your comment reminds me of this talk on focus on competitors vs focus on your vision https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x5nAaxIkmFE
Yeah, we really donât talk about the competition. In my org we only talk about the customers and their needs. Itâs kind of refreshing.
Agree with what others have said here. Donât really discuss about Walmart or other competitors. We just focus on customer problems and talk about how to solve them. Even if that kills our WLB like on blind, we donât really talk about competitors.
TBH, never heard any discussion about Walmart in many years. We only discuss Amazon Leadership principles. We also remind ourselves not to be competitor focused.
I did 2 rounds of interview with Walmart and was supprised to learn that you are building your own cloud. Is that still going on ? And why are you building your own cloud ?
No one knows what the cloud plan is and the CTO won't give us a straight answer. We just want a modern and automated tool though. most of the decisions Walmart makes is based on cost. We tend to think that building something ourselves will cost less, but the resulting slow evolution ends up costing us more. For example, there's a team that wrote their own CI tool that is configured via YAML. I'm not sure why we didn't just use something that exists already that does a better job, but I'm sure the reason was financial. And now, we're too far down that path to back out.
What a good CTO will do is the following: 1. Core for my business, do it yourself. 2. Commodity, someone already did it.. don't reinvent the wheel and leverage what is out there. 3. One time thing that could take resources from something that is core for my business... Potentially outsource. For the CI tool... Unless you want to sell that as a service/platform, doesn't make sense to build it from scratch internally. My 2 cents.
Amazon is very customer obsessed company and itâs for real. We do mention some competition at times as itâs necessary for the context, but nothing more than that. I have previously worked at another retailer and every meeting there was about â how amazon does itâ, and Walmart seems no different. Itâs how Amazon was built from the ground up.
Amzn is not a follower but a leader. So we donât care discussing abt competition. Like others said main focus is on solving customer problems and innovate if required
Amazon doesnât talk about competitors because we are focused on the customers
That's the corporate mantra. It's at least 60% true, but half the time we should have. The competition has smart people too and sometimes they figure out what customers want.
We shit on Oracle more than WMT in general (even on the eCommerce side), but that's because it's such low hanging fruit relative to what we consider good customer experience. I've heard discussion about you guys upping your same day shipping but no one seemed too worried, customer obsessed and all.
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Number one competitor? Maybe Alibaba
Lol