Jeremy King - CTO at Walmart

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(Joel Beasley at 00:01:03) Remember, great leaders grow companies. Visit leaderbits.io/clear to set up your CLEAR review today. Now get excited, because today we are talking to Jeremy King, the CTO at Walmart, and we discuss building trust with your stakeholders by being open and transparent, their approach to hiring over 4,000 technologists in just under two years, and what metrics Jeremy finds most useful to keep track of. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:41) Here

(Jeremy King at 00:01:41) we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:42) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:53) So where are you calling in from today?

(Jeremy King at 00:01:56) I'm from California today. I'm on the road quite a bit, but this week I've got a few days in California and a few days on the road.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:05) How much time do you spend traveling?

(Jeremy King at 00:02:07) I'm on the road quite a bit, actually. About half of our team is in Arkansas, and I've got about 2,000 out here in California, and then there's another thousand in Bangalore. So I'm all over the place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:21) That's exciting. You get to go around and see all the different teams in the different areas.

(Jeremy King at 00:02:24) Yeah, it's good. We just opened a new building down in Carlsbad, California, and that office is great. The team is wonderful, but it's like five minutes from the beach. You wonder why the entire Silicon Valley doesn't live down there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:38) Right. I'm lucky enough—I live in a beach vacation town in Florida.

(Jeremy King at 00:02:43) Oh, great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:44) Yeah. So everybody's always so excited about the beach, but I'm a native here. So just driving to the store, you see the beach.

(Jeremy King at 00:02:49) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:51) Yeah. So is there a lot of good mountain biking out in California?

(Jeremy King at 00:02:55) There's a lot of really good mountain biking out here. Yes. Yeah. It's a little wet. I didn't go this weekend because it's been really wet and the trails get pretty trashed when you go out on them. But yeah, this time of year we get about a month of rain, and then it'll be dry and beautiful the rest of the year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:11) Now, is it clay or dirt?

(Jeremy King at 00:03:13) It's dirt. The Santa Cruz Mountains is where the bulk of people go. Sort of all the way down from San Francisco, down south of Gilroy, there's just beautiful mountain trails. They're up in the hills. You get the redwoods, and once you get up on top of the mountain, you can see the ocean on one side and Silicon Valley on the other. It's surreal up there. It's a beautiful place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:38) Now, I haven't ever been to the West Coast for mountain biking, but I mountain bike a lot on the East Coast. But I have been to the West Coast in the Vegas area for hiking, like I think it's Red Rock or something we hiked.

(Jeremy King at 00:03:52) Red Rock and all that out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:53) Oh, that was amazing. There's so many pieces out there.

(Jeremy King at 00:03:55) I've never been to Red Rock, but I've heard—same thing with like Joshua Tree and all those places—it's incredible. Right? Yeah, something on my list. I've gone to Grand Canyon, all through the South, but not to those places. I'd love to try them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:11) So I saw that you were part of the CTO Forum.

(Jeremy King at 00:04:14) Yes. Yeah. You know Bashir and the team there?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:17) I have not, but what I'm noticing is, from the popularity of the podcast, I'm starting to go to these events and conferences, and I found out that there's all these forums of these great technology leaders that collect together in their cities. And I saw that you were on one of them, and I was like, "Oh, that's so cool."

(Jeremy King at 00:04:34) Yeah, I actually love the CTO Forum for a bunch of reasons. Mostly, it's funny—we laugh when we're there that CTOs don't have a lot of cohorts inside the company, if you will. You know, the sales and marketing guys often will get together, and the CEO is usually an ex-sales guy or something. But the CTO is sort of—typically around the executive table—usually the only technologist there. And so these kinds of forums, we talk about how we can go and cry on each other's shoulders about our woes of being a CTO. But also, it's great because you see, in this conference in particular—because largely it's Silicon Valley-based—you get the Googles, the Facebooks, the YouTubes, the Netflixes and LinkedIns. And then you've got sort of the people who are in the middle of the pack, you know, the Walmarts of the world, and then you've got the people that are really on a technology transformation. So all three of them together, all talking about challenges of digital transformations and seeing what the industry is doing, is wonderful.

(Jeremy King at 00:05:45) And oftentimes, these—I mean, I really do not like trade shows. I had to go work trade shows when I was in enterprise software for a while, and that'll turn you off in your own life. And also, you know, how many vendor pitches do you want to hear in one day? And in these forums, it's more about idea sharing than it is about pitches, if you know what I mean. Like, here's—and you can compare and contrast different vendors from each other without, you know—and you get the real download, if you know what I mean.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:13) Oh, yeah. So I had a transition, right, from developer into the CTO space. And one of the big things I realized in that transition is, at first I looked at the whole networking social thing as, "Oh no, you just got to be writing code all the time. You have to always be improving your craft and 100% focus on this 24/7." And then I realized that you can't get far without relationships. Like, it's always about the people. And so when I see forum groups like this that collect together, I always like to talk about the importance of networking and relationships. So if there is—well, right now I guarantee that there's some individual going from that developer to CTO position, or just developer to team lead—can you talk to them about the benefits in your career of networking and relationships?

(Jeremy King at 00:07:01) It is an excellent point. And you know, oftentimes the engineer-CTO kind of background is oftentimes they're sort of introverted engineer types, and they don't understand the value of that type of relationship. And I totally agree. I can't tell you the number of times I've picked up the phone. As a matter of fact, just last week I was doing some work on edge computing, and I picked up the phone and I called a buddy of mine and said, "Hey, who knows like the intricacies of data center space and how much profit is being made in these sort of data centers and that sort of thing?" He's like, "Oh, we have this one guy. Here, pick up the phone and call him." And you get a question that might have cost you a fortune to go out and get a consultant or whatever, and you just build these networks yourselves. So those kinds of forums really introduce that. But, back to my point, I think everybody goes through their own digital transformation journeys in their own way, in their own speed. In some cases, even companies that are not very tech-savvy may have found some technology that's really helping them transform faster. And then, of course, you want to know what's going on when people are negotiating contracts. So it's a wonderful place to do that, not to mention the camaraderie of the whole thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:29) I love it. I love getting together with people. Oh, it's amazing.

(Jeremy King at 00:08:32) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:32) Now, so I would say it's understated to what you would imagine it would be. You go out there, you get connected with a good group of people, and then you have essentially like work friends—like professional friends, some become friend-friends—but it's just unbelievable the amount of change and opportunity that can come once you have the network. Now speaking of people, do you happen to know Yazir Anwar?

(Jeremy King at 00:08:55) Is he—well, is he from Verizon? Is that right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:59) So you have overlap at Walmart Labs.

(Jeremy King at 00:09:02) Oh, you're talking about—oh, Yazir. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. You're talking about Macy's, right? And Williams-Sonoma?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:08) Yeah. Yeah. So he was at Macy's and at Williams-Sonoma.

(Jeremy King at 00:09:11) Absolutely. Yes, I know him very well. Yeah, he—I just congratulated him on his new job, right, over there. I think he's only been there a little while. But yeah, he worked on the Walmart Labs team early on and did some work on the platform side. So yeah, he worked for a good friend of mine, but I knew him very well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:31) I'm interested in Walmart Labs because a number of really great leaders have come out of there. So we do extensive research on all of our guests and get to know everybody, and we keep notes. And so, for example, when you were coming on the show, your experiences at Walmart Labs—our team identified the overlap in experience, and then we said, "Hey, we've got to ask him if he knows Yazir." So I'm curious, what do you think Walmart Labs is doing that's producing a lot of these great leaders?

(Jeremy King at 00:09:59) You know, I think it's a good question. I think what most people don't recognize is the amount you can learn about scaling in particular. I mean, I talk about this all the time with vendors. I get these solutions that are good for either very small companies or companies that have a small footprint physically. And then you look at Walmart, and we're talking about every system we have is generating petabytes worth of data. Every system that we integrate with the store, you have to not only look at all 5,000 stores in the US, but 10,000 stores internationally. So you're looking at pretty much everything we look at has a scaling component to it. And as a result, we teach people scale. And I saw that at eBay as well. And, you know, people look at companies who've gone through the scaling pain problems before and use that. You know, Yazir and there's a number of other leaders that were local here.

(Jeremy King at 00:11:05) And I think we also did a pretty interesting job on the digital transformation side. Even the name "Walmart Labs" was trying to convey the fact that not only are we a research arm of the company, but we're delivering solutions for our customers in a new way that Walmart hadn't really thought of before. It's not fair to say that, but technology has always been a part of Walmart, but we don't usually get credit for that externally. Right? So we had to do a fair amount of branding just to get people to understand that I'm hiring for the latest data scientists, the latest architecture cloud architecture folks—that everything that we touch has a scaling factor to it that people are compelled to. So I think just spending a lot of time in the media also gets attention from some companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:08) So speaking of scaling, I read online that you're planning on hiring 2,000 technologists last year, right?

(Jeremy King at 00:12:15) Yeah. This year. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:16) This year.

(Jeremy King at 00:12:17) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:18) So I'm curious to know—so we have CTOs of all levels. So for the higher-level CTOs, right, the ones that are more enterprise area like you are at—what did your involvement actually look like tactically to deploy that? Did you work with an HR team? Like, how did that process go for you?

(Jeremy King at 00:12:38) Yeah. We spent a lot of time last year sort of figuring out how to scale the organization. But as we've gone through the digital transformation part of the company, what we're really seeing now is, as we've lessened our reliance on some legacy technologies, we've been able to move much faster as an organization. And so when you look at investments across the board in the company, we can invest in building new stores and remodeling stores, in store labor rates—all the things that a company goes through when they're doing an investment profile. And what they've really seen over the last couple years is that a dollar put in Walmart Labs and investing in technology has returned money back to the company faster. So we tried this last year to accelerate our hiring and did very well. We hired about 1,700 people last year. And the people that we brought on board made huge leaps very quickly in places like forecasting and replenishment in our supply chain business. And we launched a new redesigned version of our website and a number of in-store apps. And the company is starting to see the output of that engineering effort turn into really fruitful benefits for the company.

(Jeremy King at 00:14:05) And so we talked, again, this year, like, what other things we have. You know, every corporation has a never-ending list of things that they want to go build, and really the question was, how many more people could we actually go get? So we're going to try and get another 2,000 this year, and we're well underway to do that. But it is, as you said—you know, I don't believe in the hiring practice where you just bring on a cohort of 100 people and then they go figure out which part of the company they want to go work in. We work fairly traditionally and say, "Hey, we want people who are passionate about supply chain or passionate about merchandising or passionate about data science or passionate about the consumer front end or mobile apps." And we really focus our recruiting effort on those pieces so that when you get into the organization, you really love what you do and you can really make a big difference. So you always meet the hiring manager. You always understand what the goals and objectives of the organization are, and you can make a lot of progress on hiring.

(Jeremy King at 00:15:13) So we're in interview craze right now. We're doing interview days and things like that. I think, you know, oftentimes companies can be successful at bringing on several people, but it's going to be a long ride. I mean, obviously there's a lot of people out there, but the more and more people hear about what we're doing at Walmart, the easier it is to get people through the front door, you know what I mean?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:37)
So what are you most excited about? What's something that would attract people listening to this podcast? Some technology that you're working on?

(Jeremy King at 00:15:44)
Oh, boy. It's across the board. I'm responsible for really four or five main areas. So as I outlined, we really have been focused a ton on the front end. So online grocery has been the biggest growth area of Walmart in the last couple years.

(Jeremy King at 00:16:00)
So we've doubled the size of that team, and it's really developing the app, but also the consumer experience across the board. So we built, you know, sometimes I say we built our own ride sharing application because we're seeing not only customers coming to the store, but we're also working with third parties to build a delivery service as well. So we have last mile delivery services in many areas. We built notifications for pickup. So when you're headed to the store, you check in and we can follow you as you arrive. And that way, you're literally sitting in a parking lot for, you know, 30 seconds as we come out and put your groceries into the car. And those kind of experiences are not always customer facing from the UI perspective, but they're super compelling on the back end perspective. So we're building all those pieces. We're building new front end apps for grocery, and that includes things like personalization. And the fun part about this job is you're intermingling your store shopping experience with your online experience.

(Jeremy King at 00:17:12)
So if you've been to Walmart in the last six months, I know what you buy on Wednesdays. I know what you buy on Fridays. I know what you pick up on the weekends, and I can make those recommendation engines for you online based on what I think you're gonna run out of and that sort of thing. So how do I take that offline data and marry it with the online experience so that when you're coming to shop for sometimes 50 or 100 items, how do I make that shopping experience super easy? And that's the personalization recommendation engine and just the overall UI of the experience.

(Jeremy King at 00:17:44)
You know, what do we got this week? When it's Thanksgiving, you're ordering pumpkins and turkeys, and when it's Christmas, you got your hot chocolates and your candies and stuff. Right? So we can make those kind of experiences much, much easier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:02)
I've got something for you.

(Jeremy King at 00:18:04)
Yeah. Bring it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:04)
Okay. So we geek out. We build products. Right? You have a programming background as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:10)
Right? That's like your... Yeah. So I had in this office, I think it was like a couple weeks ago on a Friday afternoon, we were just making stuff up. Right? Just a fun brainstorming session of products and ideas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:23)
And this grocery thing actually came up. And so the idea was that it would know everything that I buy frequently, right, that I like to eat. And then it would also know — it would put me into some persona or some category with people who have similar taste as I do. And then when I wanna try something new in a new category, like, let's say, I wanna try a new pasta or something, it would tell me based off of that little persona, that little network I'm in, which pasta I would like the most.

(Jeremy King at 00:18:52)
I see. So like a group — would people know each other, or you're just saying you would be part of the cohorts?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00)
Yeah. You just pay attention to what products I'm buying, what food I'm eating, and then you can either suggest new foods based on what other people who have my similar taste patterns like.

(Jeremy King at 00:19:09)
Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:10)
Right? Or if I wanna try something in a new category, you could tell me which — like, if I'm gonna try like 10 different types of pastas, but it knows all the other food I eat and all the other things I like, and it knows that all these... You get it. Right?

(Jeremy King at 00:19:23)
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. The sort of cohort analysis on that and sort of "people who like this also like this."

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:30)
Yep.

(Jeremy King at 00:19:30)
You know, is something we've been doing for a while. I think I agree with you, and I think the interesting thing is a lot of this becomes more hyperlocal. You know, right now it's raining and 50 degrees in California. My son's in Indiana at Purdue, and it was minus 30 there. Right?

(Jeremy King at 00:19:49)
You know, so people are buying — as a matter of fact, I think we saw some trends on soups going up in the sort of cold fronts as we're going on. We're selling more soup across the country than we normally do. Right? And that sort of hyperlocal can also be a really interesting aspect as well. What people's tastes are, but also weather related events and who knows what else.

(Jeremy King at 00:20:10)
You know, what's fresh and that sort of thing. We run into this a ton. Walmart is the biggest supplier of organics and fresh and frozen produce and meats in the world, and we need local growers and what's locally available. You know, we just can't get enough of it. Organics in particular, how do we get more?

(Jeremy King at 00:20:30)
So how do you make a recommendation? "Hey. We've got some really great local, fresh kale or whatever that's grown locally." How do you get that out to the consumer? Do you know we've got it available?

(Jeremy King at 00:20:45)
So that's where the scale turns really interesting as well where you're not talking about just packaged goods. You're talking about how do I get this in a fresh experience that people will love.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:55)
No, that's like... That excites me as the future. I wanna, you know, fresh peaches down at the store. Yeah. And then I could just one tap last mile delivery. Boom. Now it's just at my house.

(Jeremy King at 00:21:06)
Yeah. Absolutely. We talk about this a lot. Two years ago, we celebrated some local growers, and I think the woman was a watermelon grower. And she's a big supplier to Walmart. When she was first getting started, she just had the one field and one truck and, you know, was driving to the Walmart to drop off her local goods. But how do you make sure that information is getting out? And that ties all the way back into the supply chain. So I've talked a lot about the customer experience stuff, but the supply chain and merchandising parts of this job are almost the place where it's even more compelling. And I've talked a lot about where data science and machine learning are gonna make the biggest transition.

(Jeremy King at 00:21:47)
Everybody loves talking about the personalization engines and sort of recommendation engines on the front end, but it's really about things like I was describing. Like, how do you price this stuff? How do I make sure I can get enough of it? You know, getting my replenishment more predictable, if you will. So I can smooth out my supply chain and make sure I'm having the freshest, best stuff in the stores at all times?

(Jeremy King at 00:22:11)
And I think that will make the biggest change for retailers. Machine learning will have the biggest impact on merchandising and supply chain for retailers than any other area. So, and I think it's part of Walmart's core values anyway. Our whole drive for technology is to not only build great customer experiences, but to drive costs out of the whole system. The goal is to effectively continue to lower the cost for consumers so that we can continue to drive Walmart as a low price leader.

(Jeremy King at 00:22:49)
So anything I can do on the technology side to drive costs out, you know, is just part of the Walmart strategy overall.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:55)
In my mind, when you were describing that, I was imagining like drones flying over like, you know, grandma's crops predicting yields based off of like image recognition.

(Jeremy King at 00:23:05)
I have seen a lot of those. I know a lot of farmers these days are doing that type of work, and I agree. The ability to predict freshness is something that we look at a lot. And, you know, typically, that's — farmers for generations are gonna know, "Hey, this thing's gonna be pickable." But your point is right about how do you micro water things so that the entire field is ripening at the same rate and these sorts of things are pretty compelling. And I think as we talk about things like food waste and how much waste happens in the supply chain overall, the better we can do that, the better we can feed America and keep our prices down.

(Jeremy King at 00:23:49)
Right? And that's the key because so much is just wasted in the supply chain as they're getting out of the field. So some really good work going on there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:57)
Have you seen any of the startups that are doing the fully autonomous organic growth of — I think they got like, they can do lettuce and some other basic things down?

(Jeremy King at 00:24:05)
Yeah. We just had, we have a kickoff meeting every year that we call YBM, Your Beginning Meeting. And this year, I was just down in Houston, and there was this sort of organic farmers that are growing up. You know, they have these — they're almost, they almost look like these big chains and they're growing lettuce in this case upwards. And I think that's gonna be a game changer for the... Because we talked about if you could build these containers, I've also seen some companies that are building containers that we were talking about.

(Jeremy King at 00:24:40)
You could put them in Walmart parking lots or on the roof of the building, and you could get really fresh and you just basically take the supply chain out of it. You know, somebody goes up in the morning and picks the lettuce from the parking lot and then walks it into the store for you to buy it. I mean, talk about how great that would be. So there's a lot of innovation there. And, again, the biggest problem that we're having is how to scale that.

(Jeremy King at 00:25:02)
You know, I need to do that in 5,000 locations and 100 degrees, and sometimes it's minus 30, you know, in our locations. So you have to be able to deal with all of those problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:13)
The drone could pick the lettuce and fly it right into your house.

(Jeremy King at 00:25:17)
Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:20)
You've gotten to go, you know, Houston, you travel a lot. You've gotten to go to a lot of cool places and do many cool things. Have you ever had the opportunity to go to SpaceX?

(Jeremy King at 00:25:29)
I haven't, actually. I would love to. My daughter is enamored by them, and we wanna go watch a launch, either in The Cape or down in LA where they've been doing lately. So no. I definitely do wanna visit. Have you been down there yourself?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:47)
No. So here's the thing. So it's my birthday today, so I'm very excited.

(Jeremy King at 00:25:50)
Birthday. Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:51)
Thank you. I'm 31. And this whole podcast, everything grew over the past year, so it was an amazing year. Like, unbelievable. So surprised by it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:00)
And I was thinking, you know, how could I do this next year better, like, bigger? And I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk. And so one of the things we're always talking about is what excuse could we have to meet Elon Musk.

(Jeremy King at 00:26:13)
Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:14)
And we were talking at my birthday dinner this weekend, and I was like looking at the list of upcoming guests — you, CTOs, like GitHub, Johnson and Johnson, just all these great huge companies. And I said, you know what? Elon Musk is a nerd. Like, he's geeky like us. I bet he would think that it's cool to meet — like, if I got a group of like 10 or 12 of them.

(Jeremy King at 00:26:35)
That's cool. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:35)
Awesome CTOs together, then we could do like a roundtable at SpaceX, like tour the facility and make sure that we set it up for a day that Musk is there.

(Jeremy King at 00:26:44)
Yeah. There you go. There you go. The Tesla factory is right across the street from us, and I have seen — I don't know if you've ever been in through the tours or any of those things, but one of the... When I went and picked up my first Tesla, I've now got another one. But they show the shop floor and where all the executives sit. In the old world, they took over the old NUMMI plant here, which was Toyota's, and I think before that was Ford. And the interesting part about it is where the executives sit now are laid out completely plainly. There's like 20 desks just sort of sitting out on the shop floor, and they all look identical with a computer screen on it and that sort of thing. And the only one that had any difference was there was a MotorTrend Car of the Year award trophy sitting on one of the desks. And the guy who was giving the tour said, "Oh, yeah. That's Elon's desk right there." Right? You know, he comes in and sits right there. I think they now have corporate offices and things. They don't do that anymore.

(Jeremy King at 00:27:45)
But when he first came out, it is amazing how he's transformed so many industries. Right? It's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:51)
I'm a huge fan. So if I manage to get that together, that's something you'd be interested in?

(Jeremy King at 00:27:56)
I'd definitely be interested. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:57)
Alright. Cool. I don't think there's anybody else even wondering. I was like, what if we did this and then we did this with another great technologist? And I was like, there's pretty much like three people who I could even think of doing this with, and that would be Musk, Gates, and Bezos.

(Jeremy King at 00:28:12)
Yeah. Got it. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13)
Yeah. I think I just think that it would be the coolest... I was like, we'll start with one. Start. Start with us.

(Jeremy King at 00:28:19)
Start there. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:20)
That'll be this year, and we'll see if we can get that together. Awesome. So advice for first time leaders. It's like a big topic we have on the show. You made the transition. At one point, you were an individual contributor. You became a first time leader. Yeah. What are some of the lessons, the takeaways from that?

(Jeremy King at 00:28:38)
You know, I talk about this a lot when I do — I go back to my alma mater, and I teach an e-commerce MBA class, and typically a guest speaker kind of thing. And people always ask me how I got where I was, and one of the things I push relatively hard, especially on engineers, is you see a lot of engineers wanting to jump to management early in their career. And I really try to push hard back on that to say, please do not join the management ranks too early. And what I really mean by that is I need you — you should build an expertise in something, in some part of the... You should be the technical expert for Node or Python or some system, some supply chain system or whatever. Because at some point in your career, you've gotta be the person who people go to to get information, or if you know what I mean. Right? And so I drive and drive that home because I see so many people wanting to jump to management. So that being said, once they jump to management, then you start talking about things like mentoring, and I think you covered this on a few of your podcasts. I got lucky that I had a really strong mentor early who was really hard on me, but also had my back. But I found later that he was actually using me as much as I was using him. You know what I mean? And so don't underestimate your experience and your local connection with your team and how important that is to your bosses, if you will. Right? And what I mean by that is how is it going culturally? What are people, you know, quote unquote complaining about?

(Jeremy King at 00:30:25) What are people thinking that's going well? And, you know, what's the sort of overall pulse of the organization? And that, you know, for leaders, as you get more senior, you know, I find myself spending quite a bit of time with my mentees. And most of my mentees are not managers. Some of them are, but I spend a lot of time with the sort of, you know, mostly senior engineers to talk about technology that I want to learn, but also folks who I can rely on to give me the honest truth.

(Jeremy King at 00:30:56) Right? And most of the managers I know just want to cut to the chase and find out, like, somebody who will tell them what's going on. Don't give me any BS. You know? Tell me this is what's really happening.

(Jeremy King at 00:31:08) Here's what people think. Here's, you know—because a lot of people are trying to, you know, impress the boss, and they don't want to come with bad news. I want to hear the bad, and that's the reason I need you to tell me what's going on. Right?

(Jeremy King at 00:31:19) And so don't underestimate your knowledge there and make sure you can articulate that well in an elevator speech or if you're going to have a half hour meeting. So, anyway, that's—I know a lot of people, you know, ask me about, you know, what's the do's and don'ts, but I have a few of those, but that's another topic probably.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:40) So what stands out to you with these engineers? What I gathered from that was honest, direct communication. Those things, when you see those happening within these senior engineers, that triggers something that, hey, maybe I'll keep them close, invest some time into them, mentor them.

(Jeremy King at 00:31:57) Yes. A lot of people ask, obviously, you know—I've heard lots of relatively famous people give almost the same speech about this. They're saying, people will come and ask me to be their mentor, but, you know, number one, I've never really met them. I don't know, you know, what their real goals are in life and that sort of thing. Would I even be a good mentor?

(Jeremy King at 00:32:19) I have no idea. And so, you know, typically, I coach people not to ask for a mentor relationship until they've built up some other kind of relationship with them, whether it's, you know—again, I'm asking for expertise or, you know, I see them in meetings or, you know, talk to them in the hallways, that sort of thing, and you sort of get to know them first before you talk about a mentee relationship. I don't mind having a one-on-one meeting with somebody one or two times, but, you know, a mentor relationship is something that really has to be bidirectional. Right? And it's not always a compatibility there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:56) Yeah. I don't—I like this question too because I've never asked someone to be a mentor. Maybe in my head, I thought about it, but then I figured that, you know, what would they say to me on this topic? And then I realized, okay. Well, I just need to go learn more about the topic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:11) So I have a specific question to ask them that's not going to be frustratingly one-oh-one. Right? And then I figured, oh, there doesn't need to be this official pairing relationship to, like, ask. All I have to do is come up with a good enough question, go get beat up enough, get some experience. And then when I have some legitimate struggle or inquiry, just go to them and say, hey, this is what I'm experiencing, this is what I've done, what is your insight?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:37) And then everyone's a mentor because they respect the question because they understand your level of competence in the topic.

(Jeremy King at 00:33:44) 100%. I agree. Yeah. I love that. As a matter of fact, you're right.

(Jeremy King at 00:33:48) And frankly, most, you know, leaders want to spend time on that anyway, right, on those kind of pieces. We have a—you know, I always tease my poor finance partner that, you know, the least favorite time I have in my job as CTO is spending time in budget meetings. Right? You know, I would rather spend time on mentoring people and talking about a new technology stack or whatever than doing that. And so when you get compelled, when somebody approaches you with some great question like that, oh, you want to dive in.

(Jeremy King at 00:34:22) Right? So, yeah, you're 100% correct. You know, find a topic, especially if you know a person's interested in it, then you could do well at researching that topic. Right? Not to schmooze the boss or whatever, but, you know, you know what I mean.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:36) No. You're doing it to advance and grow yourself.

(Jeremy King at 00:34:38) And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:39) By necessity, you need the expert's input. And so when you raise yourself to that level, that, you know, it's just amazing. It's that feeling of growth. Now do you have a favorite metric that you find particularly useful to track?

(Jeremy King at 00:34:54) You know, I track two main things, and I always tell people there's really two things that a CTO is measured by when you get down to it. I mean, my CEO and what the company is relying on is to make sure that my systems are up all the time, you know. So what's my system availability is number one priority for the company. So nobody wants to deal with a set of unstable systems that crash all the time or have bugs and that sort of thing. So you can add quality in there, but I really think about system availability as number one.

(Jeremy King at 00:35:30) Number two, I got, you know, this job because people want me to deliver projects and capabilities for the customer as fast as possible. Right? You know? So, you know, having the reputation and a really high bar for delivery is the second metric. And a lot of people use different mechanisms.

(Jeremy King at 00:35:53) In the old days, you were talking about sort of on-time delivery of projects and that sort of thing. In the new, sort of product world, the last five or ten years, really talking about time to value. So, hey, I have a new set of capabilities I want to deliver for my customer. It includes, you know, I want to take my returns experience, my in-store returns experience from five minutes to thirty seconds, you know. Or and it turns out we really want it to be five seconds. So I want to see real progress when we can make—okay.

(Jeremy King at 00:36:23) It was five minutes, now it's three minutes, now it's thirty seconds. And so we've developed features that allow people to—you know, when I'm going to return an item to the store, you know, I can work on my phone or on my computer at home and say, hey. I really want to return this item. And so we give you a little QR code. You walk into the store and we have this fast returns line and you just go up to the kiosk and scan your code and you just hand the item back and you're done.

(Jeremy King at 00:36:51) You're out of there. Right? So it took a five-minute experience down to a five-second experience. And these are the kind of things that you want to be. Yes.

(Jeremy King at 00:36:59) Exactly. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:00) I know you hand clap for that.

(Jeremy King at 00:37:01) What a surprise. Customers love it. Right? You know, you always hate when you have to go to the store and return something. Right?

(Jeremy King at 00:37:06) If we can make that an easy experience, it's great. So, um, so that's really the second one, time to value, how to deliver. The third one that I've added, and I don't—I talk about this with other CTOs—is the other thing I get all the time is transparency. And what I mean by that is, you know, I can't tell you the number of times people have said, hey, you must have five people in your organization that can go work on XYZ project, you know. And typically, I can carve out, you know, one or two of those a quarter to go work on, but I really don't have five people available.

(Jeremy King at 00:37:41) They—I've got my teams running super hard on lots of experiences and new capabilities for the customer in the supply chain and merchandising. And, um, but the way I'm able to articulate that is I use all the latest tools, the Jira and GitHub and all the modern tools that allow me to show the organization. Here's how much I'm spending on each one of these capabilities. So when somebody comes to me and says, hey, you know, how much were you spending on supply chain? I can just go click and here we go, I can show them.

(Jeremy King at 00:38:16) And that level of transparency gives the organization trust that I'm not squandering money or I've got side projects or, you know, I've got projects that I'm not telling about, you know, and I'm really transparent about when a project isn't going well, I'm really transparent about that it's not going well. We are having some technical difficulties or we underestimated it or that sort of thing. And being open and transparent, you know, gives you a lot of freedom to take risks in the organization as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:42) Well, it's because you build your level of trust. Right? Just as you were saying earlier, what stands out to you is people being honest, direct, and communicating. Right? Let me know what the problems are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:52) So the same is true with your peers and your stakeholders. If you're transparent to them, now you get—you get the CEO and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:59) And the CFO, you get three brilliant people that are involved in the problem that you're facing, and it's like, let's just tackle this as a team. But if you hold that back—

(Jeremy King at 00:39:08) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:08) That's how you get in trouble.

(Jeremy King at 00:39:10) I always give people a hard time when they say, you know, their philosophy is under-promise and over-deliver. I've never believed in that. I've always been, you know, we are going to push this thing to the edge. If I can get this shipped a month earlier, we were going to push, you know, we're going to push to get it shipped a month earlier. It might be a day later, four or five days late, but I push the team.

(Jeremy King at 00:39:32) I mean, if somebody else would have sandbagged the date and said, hey. It's going to take us an extra thirty days. And then, hey, they just, you know, they just squandered twenty-eight days because they could have got it done sooner, but they were too, you know, they were too chicken essentially to say they could get it done a month earlier. And they might not have made that month, but they made it a month and two days earlier or, you know, twenty-eight days earlier. And as a result, you know, I don't want to get dinged by that, you know, saying that I actually pushed the team really hard and we got it out there.

(Jeremy King at 00:40:03) So the under-promise, over-deliver, I just have never been a believer in. I think if you give the team a goal and they know what they're trying to deliver, they're going to go as hard as they can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:12) Well, yeah. Because you have your culture right. You've got the right people and the positions.

(Jeremy King at 00:40:17) Yeah. People really want to deliver great stuff in the end. Right? When you get the right teams in place, you know, people have a passion for it, and they really will deliver.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:28) Yeah. I wake up every day. I'm like, what else is there to do but just work hard and change the world? Exactly. I'm just excited.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:35) What trend is the biggest on your radar that you think, you know, might have the largest impact on your team or organization? There's a lot of trends out there, but what trend is coming up the most?

(Jeremy King at 00:40:46) Well, I've talked about machine learning a lot, and I think I do think the thing that has changed Walmart Labs in the last two years is really the ability to get access to really great, not only compute resources and data, but also access to, you know, pretty standard machine learning algorithms that will make a pretty big change in the world in their particular program. And it's really the simplification of programming maybe in general. But I think in particular in access to the machine learning world. And so what we really spent the last year on is how do I make sure I'm collecting the right data that is accurate and that it's in a place that's easily accessible. And so, because what you really see is the second you start doing some work on machine learning, you start running into data problems.

(Jeremy King at 00:41:42) I don't have a way to capture the data in real time. And and, so as we've moved away from sort of the traditional batch processing systems, we've moved all of our systems to event streams and effectively getting everything into real time. And that is, that's probably the biggest change we made in the last two years. As we go forward, I think, you know, I think computer vision is going to be applied in so many places. You know, a lot of people talk about the, you know, sort of checkout-less retail stores, but I think you can use it in dozens of other places, including not only self-driving cars and that sort of thing that Elon and those guys are working on.

(Jeremy King at 00:42:24) But think about your supply chain, like, where trucks are in the warehouse, where, you know, where a particular box is, how much inventory do you have. We've got, obviously, our shelf-scanning robots that help us look for out-of-stocks and that sort of thing. But, you can look at traffic patterns, you can look at security, physical security, products and just making the entire supply chain and merchandising processes easier. So I think that's a big one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:57) And there's so many wins at every single stage. Like, you mentioned finding where the box is in the warehouse. Right? Yeah. Which—the sensors on the truck, you know, is it going to break down and get rerouted?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:09) Yeah.

(Jeremy King at 00:43:09) I agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:10) Like and then all the way down to where does the physical product live on the shelf? Like, if you have a robot move products around and find the most optimal position for their sales, that's kind of, like, a unique idea. Right?

(Jeremy King at 00:43:24) Yeah. That's funny. I was talking to some other CTOs about computer vision in particular, and they were talking about, you know, retrofitting some of these warehouses or, you know, think about a factory and how many devices are in a factory that would have to be retrofitted to have a modern IoT device. And instead, what they did is they put up a video camera that just looks at the unit. You know, it can actually, you know, spot the red light going on or the gauge, and they can use, you know, basic computer vision to understand temperature and what the gauge is reading.

(Jeremy King at 00:43:57) You know, you can put a, you know, a $10 camera up and connect that up instead of retrofitting the entire warehouse or the manufacturing plant. So those even basic capabilities like that are going to transform more businesses than we think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:11) I love that. I want to be a part of that meeting where they're all discussing how to retrofit more effectively and someone just walks in and just like, hey. Put up a camera. And then—exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:20) I love those moments. So real quick, as we start to wrap up, what does your average day look like?

(Jeremy King at 00:44:27) Oh, boy. When I'm not on a plane, I'm an early bird, so I usually come in the office around seven-ish AM, maybe sometimes a little earlier, like today, and get, you know, sort of ready for the workday. So take care of all my emails and mess, anything I needed to do, but also prep out what's going on for the day and do all my pre-reads and everything I need for the day. The days are filled, like most folks in my management role. I'm filled with meetings and strategy.

(Jeremy King at 00:45:03) We have, um, what we essentially call QBRs or quarterly business reviews where I meet with each one of my engineering teams and our product partners, and we go through the sort of strategy and the road map of each of the programs. And typically see where there's hot spots or, you know, we're not hiring fast enough in this area and this is a critical point. So I spend quite a bit of time on that. That's just the fun part of my day. Those are the meetings I can add the most value in and do it.

(Jeremy King at 00:45:35) And then, boy, lately, it's been things like space planning. Like, where are we going to put all these 2,000 people, right? You know, we need new buildings and how fast can we grow in Washington, D.C. How many people can get in Carlsbad in California? So we've been doing a lot of planning this time of year. And then I wrap it up usually around 6 p.m. ish, and then emails the rest of the day.

(Jeremy King at 00:45:59) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:01) I'm an early person too.

(Jeremy King at 00:46:03) Yeah, it's important. I think most engineers aren't, and so I found not only does it help my commute, but it also gives me two hours of sort of free time in the morning that I can get ready for. And, you know, you hear people like Gates and a few others talk about thinking time. And, you know, my brain is working the best in the morning, and so I'm doing all my early strategy work and that sort of thing first thing in the morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:33) So I started reading these books and listening to some of the life motivational, personal development. And what I noticed is as I went from speaker to speaker to speaker, they had this common thread of getting up early. And so there's this one saying, you know, win the morning, win the day. And so I decided, alright, well, I have these two or three slack hours at the end of the day. Just put them up front. Front load them so that I have quiet personal time when I'm the most fresh, and then I go into the day. And I did that just for a trial for a week, and I think it's been seven months now. Oh my. I'm up at 5 a.m. I go for a run or a walk outside. I see the stars. I think. I get my mind clear. I focus on myself and, you know, what I want to accomplish and what the thoughts are I have. If I'm writing a book at the time, I'll do some writing on my walk or something. And then I have my breakfast and I get into the office around seven, 7:30 and get some work done, you know, all the emails and prep for everything. And then by the time my team gets in at 9 a.m., I'm like, my day is halfway over.

(Jeremy King at 00:47:44) Yeah, absolutely. It's funny that you say that because oftentimes, because we're a global company, I'll spend either sometime in the morning or the evening talking to our team in India, and then Arkansas is, you know, two hours ahead in my California time. So often I've already had three or four meetings by the time anybody showed in the door. And I'm like, hey, welcome to the day, guys. You know? My day's not over, right? But now it is good. I think it's helped a lot as being a leader, and I know people do it differently. You know, I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts and audiobooks as well on the way to work. I have a—you know, everybody in California has a long commute. So I spend a lot of time, and if I'm not on the phone with India in the morning or evening, I spend a lot of time on audiobooks and that sort of thing too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:33) Me too. I'm a huge fan of Audible. Yeah, I get all the books all the time.

(Jeremy King at 00:48:38) You gotta use Walmart. You gotta use Walmart, Kobo. We did a relationship with Kobo last year. So Walmart eBooks is what I use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:45) Oh, well, shout out for Walmart eBooks.

(Jeremy King at 00:48:47) No, I didn't—

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:48) I didn't know that that existed, so thank you.

(Jeremy King at 00:48:51) No, I just read a great book called Daring Greatly. If you're into the self reflection, it's really good about, you know, how people not only think about themselves, but how they portray themselves externally to other folks and how to not shame people, I guess. It's a great book, actually. Really good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:12) So into self reflection, we have a tool here at the company called ReflectDB.

(Jeremy King at 00:49:16) Really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:17) Yeah.

(Jeremy King at 00:49:18) Wow, that's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:19) We make entries into the ReflectDB.

(Jeremy King at 00:49:21) Oh yeah, interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:22) Want to call it a diary or a journal or anything. So we're like, hey, what do we call it? And then one day I'm thinking, like, let's call it ReflectDB. Let's see if that's the actual product that exists. I was like, nope, it doesn't exist. Let's just call it that.

(Jeremy King at 00:49:32) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:33) Yeah, that's fantastic. Jeremy, amazing call. Thank you. Brought so much, like, a whole new level of value to the audience. I can't thank you enough, my friend.

(Jeremy King at 00:49:42) Hey, I appreciate it. It was really nice talking to you, Joel. I've listened to a few of your podcasts, and I'll keep it up. So it's a great event. And yeah, get out to the CTO Forum sometime. It'll be excellent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:54) Absolutely. If you ever need anything from me, a connection to a past guest on the show, anything at all, you just reach out. We'll hook you up. And then if I get Musk to agree to that—

(Jeremy King at 00:50:06) I'm in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:06) Great. Okay, well, thank you so much. You enjoy your day, Jeremy, and just thank you again.

(Jeremy King at 00:50:12) No problem. Nice meeting you. Take care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:14) Talk soon.

(Jeremy King at 00:50:14) Alright, bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:15) Bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]—if you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes and I need your help in order to do this.