I joined Walmart as principal product manager 8 weeks ago. Based on my discussion with the hiring manager who was the director of product, I truly believed that this was a level up from the role I was leaving at my previous company. Right from the start, my experience has been horrible. The relocation company canceled my pickup, 3 days before I was scheduled to be moved and I had to find someone myself or move out on a later date which was not feasible since I had sold my property and had to close before a specific date. I thought that was a third party company and focused on being motivated once I started my new role but working here has been an even worse experience. There is a complete lack of structure within the organizations that I work with and almost zero traceability in terms of ownership/responsibility. Almost every document on confluence is either completely wrong or incomplete or out of date and pretty much everyone has access to update/change them. Epics and user stories have almost zero useful information and zero level of standardization. Some of the descriptions and acceptance criteria are literally like ‘Verify user story’. Product design is not scalable, seriously not adding any value and roadmap has little logical rationale behind it. I brought this up on my one on ones with the director and I was literally told to ‘not fret too much and to enjoy my honeymoon period’. She is a very nice person and has been very welcoming but I feel like almost everyone here is just cushy and comfortable with their jobs and will probably never leave the organization. The product team has almost zero business process knowledge and the entire team seemed to have been hired within the last 3-6 months. I picked Walmart over 2 other offers because of location preference, a degree of guaranteed job safety in a recession scenario (unlike Amazon) and my discussions with the director. This offer was 43K less than what Wayfair had offered. I am now really starting to get worried because I feel like everything I do here will lack in quality or reasoning and I might end up becoming someone that will be unemployable elsewhere. A couple of weeks ago I considered getting in touch with my previous manager and going back to my previous company as I was told I could always come back but I remembered the reasons for leaving and know that I will want to switch jobs in a few months anyway. This would not be a decent thing to do. Really need help with PM referrals in Supply Chain and Fulfillment. #product YOE: 11 TC: 241K
I was just about to join a couple of weeks back. Glad I took another offer
Get out of there! People are frustrated at Walmart.
Going to focus on doing that.
Good luck!
Make the best of it. Sounds like you can help clean up their mess if you stop blaming everyone for their faults. If you are good, you have the opportunity to shine. Continue looking for a new job in the mean time, but don’t escape your responsibilities as long as you are still getting paid.
To be honest it’s a lost cause. A single foot soldier can’t change Rome. It has to come in the form of a cultural change right from the top - the CEO, EVPs are all just incompetent, and happy to sit in their ivory towers and talk big about how Walmart’s still some big fish. They need to first accept that walmart really sucks at building tech products or competing at ecommerce. Institute processes to fix that first. Otherwise no matter how much one tries the result is going to be the same.
I had this mindset after the first 2-3 weeks but I truly do not believe that I can do this with the type of leadership here. The PMs that are assigned to the products have zero experience working with the product they’re supposed to support. I have had 2 PMs in the last 3 weeks who’ve come up to me asking for help and literally stating that this is all new to them. I brought this up with leadership and called it out as a risk, the response was that they had to do it because they had nobody else. They’re willing to spend in some cases upwards of $1.5 million to put out a solution that is not designed based on requirements or ROI metrics. It is almost like someone saw something fancy, decided they wanted it, wrote a check for it and overnight formed a team to do it. I took this role up not because I wanted to shine (I was doing that in my previous company as well). I took this up because I wanted to learn and challenge myself which I was unable to do in my previous role where I knew most of everything after having been there for almost 7 years. I would rather be a slightly above average performer surrounded by people that are smarter than me or who I can learn from than being a superstar at a place where I really don’t get to learn and improve. A lot of the engineering team and developers I work with share my concern but the product leadership is not willing to clean up. They’re basically ok with everything and their main objective is to keep the engineering team busy and working on “stuff”. I have been on multiple calls already where I and others on the product team have been told to just create a story so the engineering team can keep working.
Honestly Amazon is the same.
Results are different though aren’t they? Amazon builds many innovative products while Walmart can’t even build a copy cat product
Former Walmart PM here - your mileage varies drastically from product group to product group. Swimming upstream is in company DNA, so actually some things can be shifted, mindsets do change - it is a lot of effort though. If you are in a product role that allows for fast experimentation - you will gain a lot of trust by sharing the results and showing the opportunities. If you are in a product role that is more “platform”y - you are in a tough spot as there is little patience from your customer LT to understand and appreciate it.
DM for DoorDash referral.
I am actually out of DMs for the month, can you DM me instead.
DM for JP Morgan
Is this the eCommerce team? Emerging tech?
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Lol thanks for calling it out. Walmart is an utter joke