Today we welcome Kartik Kumar, Global VP – Brand, Commercial and AI Technology at Levi Strauss & Co. to our CXO of the Future Podcast. He is currently working with Levi Strauss & Co. as Global Vice President, leading digital transformation and associated product and technology portfolios. During the last 5 years of his tenure, he dramatically increased direct to consumer business revenues and championed digital transformation for the company globally. He also started several initiatives to create new revenue streams.
Additionally, Kartik led the Beyond Yoga acquisition and integrated the new business with LS&Co successfully. Prior, he served five years as VP, Software Development & Integrations at Lululemon Athletica and set up the technology office in San Francisco. In this role, Kartik had accountability for Global eCommerce, in-store, digital, and enterprise integrations strategy, roadmap, and end-to-end delivery of solutions. Kartik was instrumental in setting up the technology innovation labs based in San Francisco which co-created digital experiences across various guest touchpoints.
Question 1: First Job: What was your first job, and how did it help you build your career?
I grew up in India in a small town up north. My dad was a retired professor of math, so I’ve always had a background there from the start. I majored in computer science, and my journey began with a startup back in 2001 that was building an ERP system.
Because it was a startup, there were never clear rules and responsibilities – I wound up doing a lot of different things. So, even though my title was “Software Developer,” I was out meeting SMBs, writing specs, etc.. At the time, I actually hated it, because I just wanted to be a software engineer. But in hindsight, those experiences are what made me who I am today – because it helped me understand customer-centricity. There’s a feedback loop mechanism there – how quickly you can implement small changes and continue to iterate until the product is loved by the end user. That’s a key mantra for me: How can you make sure that whatever you’re creating keeps the consumer in mind? It’s important to move beyond the mindset of creating software in a vacuum and not necessarily understanding how it’s being used.
But, my journey in e-commerce and retail really started at Walmart. I had joined the platform labs team with Jeremy King, and once again, I was given the opportunity to quickly spin up new features and see whether or not the consumer liked them. It gave me a sense of community, and a sense of brand. It wasn’t just a selling machine, it was more about lifestyle, and bringing people together. Levi is like this too. It’s so important that you know people who aspire to be on that journey, and that people find passion in what they do.
Question 2: Leadership: What is the most important leadership skill that you have learned over your career, that has a positive impact, and can you explain with an example?
I’ve been very lucky to have great bosses and great mentors around me. You really need to find sponsorship – it can be within your company, or outside your company, one person, or more than one person. But you have to find people who will guide you on the right path, and help you navigate the complexity of global organizations. You learn so many new skills that way.
One of the most important things for me personally has been providing psychological safety to my teams. This is counterintuitively intended to help spark real debates. For any complex organization, it often tends to be about avoiding bad news, but a huge focus in my career as a leader has been how to get the learnings out of bad news. Basically, you have to turn things upside-down: don’t look at bad news as bad news, but instead as a learning opportunity.
Recently I spent time with other leaders and we created ABC (“Always be Challenging”). The goal here is to always be challenging the narrative: how can you be sure of things? And this applies to every level of the organization: people need to have a strong voice and come in and disagree on things. And as leaders, we need to be able to hear them and figure out how we can roll their feedback into the larger vision. In a lot of organizations, people see something going wrong but feel like they don’t have the space to say it out loud, because they’re concerned about bureaucracy or how they look. But when it comes to transformational programs, you really want these people to be on the journey with you, and without letting them speak their mind, they won’t be. So providing that safety net is very important.
At Lululemon I created a “pre-mortem” of bigger programs and put together meetings on what could go wrong. The idea was to give people an opportunity to talk about whatever they think could go wrong with the initiative, get the negativity out there, write it all down, and then go line by line and try and solve for things. This helped tremendously in getting people to speak up.
Question 3: Prediction: Do you have a prediction of one key technical skill or key technology that you believe is either underappreciated, or is just growing in importance?
The power of data is still very underappreciated. Many companies rush to declare themselves as data-driven, but when you double click on that, you realize it’s not exactly true–they just think it’s the right thing to say. And really, understanding data super well, and going on a journey of being data informed, needs to be a company’s first step.
Surprisingly though, this is actually a significant cultural challenge. People need to get skilled up. One of the most underappreciated skills in my opinion is product management. People think that product management is all about creating beautiful apps and sites, but it’s not just that. That’s important, but if you don’t have the right product person who understands the functional domain, can they really map business processes in a way that’s fueled by the data?
So, double down on product management skills. Double down on a product-led organization for everything, not just the website and app.
Kartik is currently working with Levi Strauss & Co. as Global Vice President leading digital transformation and associated product and technology portfolios. During the last 5 years of his tenure, he dramatically increased direct to consumer business revenues and championed digital transformation for the company globally. He also started several initiatives to create new revenue streams.
Additionally, Kartik led the Beyond Yoga acquisition and integrated the new business with LS&Co successfully. Prior, he served five years as VP, Software Development & Integrations at Lululemon Athletica and set up the technology office in San Francisco. In this role, Kartik had accountability for Global eCommerce, in-store, digital, and enterprise integrations strategy, roadmap, and end-to-end delivery of solutions. Kartik was instrumental in setting up the technology innovation labs based in San Francisco which co-created digital experiences across various guest touchpoints.
Prior to joining Lululemon Athletica, Kartik was part of WalmartLabs, leading platform architecture and strategy for Walmart.com and Latin America countries.
Prior to his career in retail, Kartik worked with various technology product companies viz. ATG (now Oracle Commerce) and AT&T labs.
