Whole Foods Market was acquired by Amazon in August 2017. My journey with Whole Foods (initially as a Consultant for their Digital Web team) began at roughly the same time.

As the Product Owner for their Digital Web team (initially as a Consultant, then as a full-time team member) I was exposed to a variety of tools and services. My initial role as a Consultant was to begin the process of moving the WFM website from Drupal 7 (a technology no longer supported and with known security issues) to Drupal 8 (the version of Drupal being currently supported by the Drupal community), one section at a time. Within my first week, I was tasked with not only converting the website to Drupal 8, but to also continue development on the Drupal 7 stack. Two development teams with entirely different goals.

Why?

There were continuing business needs (some involving the recent acquisition by Amazon) that required a concerted effort of development to release quickly. In the grocery business, the holiday season kicks off in October and we were not ready for it. WFM needed a new eCommerce storefront for their online business - called the eStore - in order to support the holiday season (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukkah). Sales were to take place in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.

Straddling two development teams with two very different goals (one to convert, one to promote), we were able to launch the initial vertical of Drupal 8 technology while updating our marketing channels on the Drupal 7 experience, and completely revamping and rebranding the eStore experience. We saw a record-breaking lift in the number of completed sales during the holiday season as a result of our eStore focus on usability, optimized path to purchase, and an optimization in our user acquisition flow.

To achieve this, it required:

• The analysis, definition, and structure of implementation guides and user stories built from stakeholder requirements

• Creative prioritization of development efforts to achieve business goals efficiently

• Responsible for coordinating efforts across WFM digital teams and stakeholders

• Owning the conception-to-achievement on our digital web platform goals, with key business success stories including the first program partnerships with Amazon (including WFM Prime programs), setting new sales records with our eCommerce platform, and more

As 2018 rolled around, we were faced with the upcoming EU regulations known as GDPR. As Product Owner of the Digital Web experience, my product was impacted by the change in regulation as we marketed and sold to users in the United Kingdom (pre-Brexit transition).

The GDPR places Amazon’s acquired ‘Whole Foods’ business unit under the scope for not only its presence in the United Kingdom, but also due to its monitoring of European Union (“EU”) data subjects, and attempt to offer them goods and/or services. Amazon’s practices most likely include the use of automated individual decision making against EU data subjects, requiring explicit consent under the GDPR. Processing is broadly defined in the regulation to include most actions that can be performed with data and can specifically refer to collection and storage, which Amazon, in this case, would be doing. The massive retailer must, therefore, have processes in place to honor nine distinct rights awarded to EU data subjects, and be able to operate under the guiding privacy principles, defined within the GDPR. The regulation further dictates appropriate security efforts around the protection of personal data, establishes breach reporting requirements, and increases the risk associated with vendors processing this data. These expansive requirements make the process of marketing and vendor outsourcing much more complex for anyone with a direct consumer relationship with EU data subjects. (source: Greg Sparrow on MyTotalRetail: "How Grocery Retailers Can Work Towards GDPR Compliance")

It was a dash to the finish line as we did not have in-house GDPR experts. My responsibility included diving heads-on into research, wire-framing an experience, writing requirements and a Statement of Work for my management team in order to pitch the only solution we could deliver on time, a creative - and perhaps controversial - approach to the problem at hand; splitting our U.K. business off our main site and into its own digital experience. With the help of the WFM marketing team and a third party vendor, we were able to design the new U.K. WFM digital experience and build a series of digital rules that incorporated geo-location and user preferences to direct the WFM digital users to the appropriate website.

Shortly after the launch of GDPR, I joined a new initiative at WFM - again as Product Owner - to being building the first WFM digital experience on the Amazon ecosystem (including AWS). Approaching the task at hand by prioritizing business verticals, we self-taught ourselves the tools available to internal Amazon employees and set about to create the first WFM digital pages built in the style of Amazon employees.

From here, I joined a different branch of the WFM technology organization as a Solution Architect. Hired as a Technology Generalist, my role as Solution Architect supported teams and branches of the organization in tech-heavy ways. I was an Architect on a supply chain management collaboration between WFM and Amazon involving software and hardware to be used within the WFM stores and supply chain management structure. I ran Lead on the internal workflow management tool called ServiceNow, and project-managed internal team initiatives.