CXO of the week: Mayur Purandar, VP Enterprise Architecture, Lowe's India

I have been in this industry for the last 22 years and the first ten years were predominantly hands-on engineering. I have coded from Perl to Java, Python and several other languages. After spending a decade doing that, I wanted to pivot and decide what I wanted to do next. Retail is one such industry where technology plays a critical roleand it’s a booming space. Hence, I decided to be a technologist in the retail space and have since worked with prominent retail companies, including Lowe’s.

I carved out the second half of my professional journey by focusing on outcomes. Technology is crucial, but so are quantifiable results and building strong teams. Going after measurable resultshelps build great technology and engineering.Through my professional journey, I am privileged to be part of a large-scale transformation, deliver crucialprojects with quantifiable results and build solid teams that have helped drive the same.

What is your successful view of your company? Where do you see it in the coming years?

We have been through a multi-year transformation journey and the pandemic has fast-tracked it. At the core of this transformation was our focus on retail fundamentals such asalways being instock, bettercustomer service and keeping stores clean.Ourfocus on retail fundamentals drove our 2019 results. As we movedforward in our journey, we made investments in technology, supply chain, e-commerce, customer service, improved category performance, operational efficiency and our PRObusiness.In 2020, when we saw the fruition of our strategy, we revisited it to bring enhanced focus and drive to achieve our goals. We built the foundation with the Total Home Strategy that will further differentiate Lowe’s and accelerate our market share gains.

From a   technological standpoint, the emphasis is again on fundamentals. We have adopted an agile and dev-ops mindsetto move fast. We have flattened our organizational structure to increase collaboration. We have embracedour hands-on engineering culture and encourage end-to-end ownership. Finally, we have adopted micro-services architecture so that our teams can independently develop and scale software components.

In the coming years, we strive to be one of the world's most customer-centric omni channel retailers.

Throughout your career journey, what was the most vital risk you took? How did you succeed? 

It is never about one big risk; if it was so, my career would not have been structured but rather a gamble. At the leadership level, wemust make decisions every day; and anyone with a sound mind would be making data-driven decisions. It’s easy to make the right decisions with adequate data, but problem arises when you are required to make crucial decisions and the data is just not enough. In such instances, you need to connect the dots and take a call relying on the incomplete data itself.

The higher you go up the ladder, the more such instances crop up, and the more one needs to take such risks. I have been taking them from both the technology roadmap and people's point of view. From hiring to promoting, there are always risks involved; in such a case relying on instinct has helped me. But what is not ok is shying away from making a tough call.

I have always lived by the philosophy that 99% of the times, decisions are reversibleand the 1% you will get wrong anyway—so if you arestuck, simply trust your instinct and take the risk instead of delaying the inevitable.

In the light of current times, what do you think about your competitors? What new challenges are there for your company? How will you manage them?

The trillion-dollar home improvement industry in the US is a duopoly—and the top two have taken about 40% of the business.There aretremendous opportunities to reimagine home improvement.

 One of the challenges when thinking technology for home improvement is being influenced by what other successful retailers have done. But their businesses are way different from each other and home improvement in particular. There are massive opportunities to reinvent retail technology for the home improvement business. And this is the most exciting aspect of my job here at Lowe’s.

The very nature of the home improvement industry makes it unique. The tech that caters to impulsive buying patterns would not help in the home improvement business where the products are a mixed bag, from a basic hammer to a full remodelling set. The home improvement business involves high purchases with an extended decision-making process. The process begins with buying your product; post buying includes acquiring accessories, instalments, services, etc. The biggest challenge as a home improvement retailer is providing one seamless channel and avoiding a fragmented experience for the multiple touchpoints involving many people. At Lowe's, we are addressing this challenge with our omnichannel technology.

Do you consider any negative aspects of pandemic and post-pandemic stages for your company's services? If yes, what are they? 

Pandemic has brought a significant change to customer buying behaviour. The barrier between digital and physical has all but vanished. For home improvement, it was typically an in-store experience. Still, due to the multiple geographical restrictions during the pandemic, consumers now use websites and mobile apps more frequently. At Lowe’s, we have introduced features like “Measure your Space” using LiDAR technology—an intuitive, end-to-end room scanning, measurement and estimate experience app. It helps customers measure their homes and eliminate any guesswork risks. Consumers today seek seamless experiences where one camera click can guide you to scan and create a floorplan and get a pricing estimate, all in their hands. Recently, Measure your space received the ‘Best Consumer App’ at the Augment World Expo

How often do you motivate your staff to boost your company's productivity? As per current market trends, how do you ensure your customer growth and exceptional experience? 

Every interaction we have, whether with the customer or engineer, should be inspiring. Ensuring customer growth and exceptional experience comes down to clarifying to our engineers what problems they are trying to solve and how they relate to customer experience and growth. Associates should know how their work connects to the organization’s objectives. When employees see their workmaking a difference in the company, they are motivated. Every interaction should have the same energy; inspiration cannot be scheduled on calendars.

Please give us a brief bird’s eye view of your business goals. What is your next move in e-commerce and the digitally intelligent world? 

Lowe’s strategy is rooted in serving our customers and our Total Home Strategy is our true north star. The five focus areas for us are: drive pro penetration, accelerate online business, expand installation services, drive localization,and elevate assortment. In achieving all this, we aim to provide the best-in-class omnichannel retail experience.

In India, what is the scope of your professional services? How do you facilitate the diversity and culture within your workplace?

At Lowe’s, I lead the team for enterprise architecture (EA) and platforms. It got formed in 2020 and since its inception, we have tried to accelerate the modernization journey of omnichannel retail core systems with the reference architectures and engineering tenets. Our EA group also focuses on building foundational frameworks and platforms that help the teams work on complex business problems and leave repetitive cookie-cutter or hard engineering platform problems to the platform teams.

On your second question:Lowe's commitment to diversity, equality and inclusion is the foundation of our culture and extends to every corner of our company. We have various Business Resource Groups (BRGs) working relentlessly to make our workplace safe, equitable and respectful with a strong sense of belonging

One of the most active BRGs at Lowe’s India is the Women Empowered (WE) BRG, which strives to hire and promote exceptional women talent. We have various equitable hiring initiatives, for instance, Do-It-herself (DIH) is our flagship women's re-internship program for professionals on a break looking to restart their careers. In the second cohort, which went live in 2022, we converted 25 candidates. Likewise, we have another woman engineering excellence program called Developing Engineering Women's Career (DEW), designed to ensure women techies have the right career progression opportunities. This initiative provides a nine-month upskill program for women Sr. Software Engineers to be future-ready for next-level roles.

Throughout my career, I have seen diversity and inclusion have always facilitated business growth. I invest in the same not just because it is the right thing to do but because it makes a lot of sense from a business point of view.