Grainger CTO Jonny LeRoy on Talent, Collaboration, and Technology as a Team Sport | Technovation 828

Collaboration is vital. I'm a big believer that technology is a team sport, not an individual effort. I'm really focused on people who want to collaborate as a team, work out how to make the team better. We're not just looking for folks in the corner with their headphones on who are individually brilliant; we want people who can make the team brilliant.

Great, it's great to be here. Great to see you.

Yeah, and we're a 96-year-old company now, a distributor of industrial supply, maintenance, repair, and operations products across a broad range of industries. I actually sometimes like to say that we sell into the basements of big buildings. So we sell into whether it's an airport or a sporting venue or a hospital or a manufacturing plant. We sell to the folks who actually keep those buildings working, and we're selling all the products they need, whether it's gloves, safety equipment, hand tools, material handling, or other products. So our job is to really keep those unsung heroes in the basements of big buildings working.

Yeah, I came in about three and a half years ago, and I sit across pretty much all of our technology, which runs from digital channels where we're taking orders through website and mobile, integrated procurement channels, through a lot of the supply chain systems, all the ERP and back office systems, and then a lot of the team member facing tools and devices from laptops and phones all the way down to printers. So pretty broad purview there. And then really what we're doing to support our data science and analytics as well. Oh, and I have that little thing, cybersecurity, also rolls up to me as well. Always a fun topic.

Yeah, we've got a pretty long-term strategy set. We understand what we have to do day in and day out, and the 20-mile march is really about showing up every day, putting in the 20 miles, and making sure we keep making progress. We think we really understand the cause and effect of what makes our business work, and our focus is less on chasing revenue and more on winning and retaining our customers. So we're really looking for market growth. The economy may go up and down, but we can control how we win customers and what we do to retain them. We understand the mechanics of that, so we're really focused on that. A lot of our technology focus is to drive those levers of how we market to our customers, how to get the right sellers in front of them, the right digital information, and make it super seamless for them to interact with us, and then even provide some benefits back to them of how they manage their cost and manage their inventory.

Yeah, we have a pretty broad team across a range of areas. A lot of my focus has been almost sort of twofold. One was really growing a net new capability around custom software development, around sort of products engineering, platform engineering. A lot of that has been a build, but then also how we upskill and raise the bar across the board and bring some more of an engineering mindset. So there are a few different angles that are really interesting. One is how to leverage the diversity of range we have across where people are in their careers. People who are 20, 30 years experience who really deeply understand the nuances and subtleties of our business, supplementing that with newer and early career folks who bring a bunch of energy and curiosity, and then really bringing in some folks who understand the new toolings and the new ways of working that we need to leverage.

If I think about talent development or engaging people, there's probably three major pieces to that. The first one, and probably the most important, is making sure that people are really aligned to the mission and understand that they can show up and do something that's meaningful. I don't want to cast aspersions onto what happens in Silicon Valley, but particularly in the pandemic, we really saw the importance of Granger's mission, which was keeping the world working. The majority of our workers were essential workers; they were showing up to keep these critical infrastructure and industries working. So from a technology perspective, a lot of what we do is make sure that each person in each team understands that the output of what they're doing, the impact of what they're doing, helps us run our business, helps us keep Granger running, that helps all these customers keep their businesses running. So laying up that mission piece is vital so people know that what they're doing matters. That's super important. And then making sure that people have the tools to do their best work, so that we can leverage all the latest tooling necessary to make sure we can automate, have access to all the right approaches we need. Working at Granger shouldn't feel that different infrastructure-wise from working at a tech company or a startup; you should have access to the right tools so you can do your best work. And then finally, it needs to be a culture that supports your growth. People should feel invested in, they should feel like they've got opportunities to grow upwards and out into different areas. We put a lot of focus on that piece as well, making sure we've got ongoing training. We just actually had a big internal tech conference with 300 or 400 people so people could share their learnings. So we invest in how to keep growing people the whole way through their career, from that early stage out of college and even before that point in their career, all the way through to retirement. We try to be that full career employer.

The pandemic obviously made a pretty big difference to how we worked, and we learned a lot. We certainly learned a lot about flexibility and how that can actually support people's day-to-day lives and actually maybe give us access and support to a sort of diverse workforce because we can have some flexibility there. So I think it's important for me to retain that flexibility, but there is something about collaboration and understanding people and wanting to work with the people you're working with and actually negotiating through some of the harder discussions that need to happen where actually spending time together is important. So we're looking at we're quite a way through when to use in-person versus where to use remote approaches. And I think there's that spectrum of in-person versus remote; there's also a spectrum of synchronous versus asynchronous that some people forget. So what can be written, what can be a collaborative document versus what needs a live conversation? We're experimenting on both those two spectrums.

But we for the tech workers we're trying to be reasonably mindful because I think I've seen some organizations make mistakes on both ends either by mandating everyone's got to be back and you see a lot of blowback and people have walk back those decisions and it just create unnecessary noise and then on the flip side saying we're going remote only it's possible and I've seen some organizations do that well but you've really got to make that your thing you've got to organize around it and make your sort of company ethos we're all remote so in neither of those things we're trying to work out the best path in the middle. On the tech side, I'm really trying to be focused on what are the activities that are better performed in person so all this activity focus rather than attendance. A lot of teams have some natural life cycle or cadence whether it be showcases or planning or retrospectives, so we started building around those and saying some of these are better done in person, particularly planning that new work. So putting people together for those. I really sort of picture people's calendars when they think about what's better done in person versus remote as these sort of nested calendars. You've got your team calendar that's probably happening week by week or sprint by sprint with what activities are better done largely in person, and then for the broader group there'll be more like monthly activities of town halls or face-to-faces or trainings that might overlay on top of that at better times to come in person.

And then across the whole Technology Group there's some stuff we're doing quarterly or annually. So I see people trying to reason about which activities are useful to be in person for. On top of that, we've definitely pushed and had some success that the more senior folks probably need to be in person a lot more often because they're really needing to collaborate but also having to work through some of the tougher decisions of where organizational tension points, the natural necessary tension points in the business between speed and budget or security and so on, need to get played out. There I think a bit of the human touch is pretty helpful and being in person is a helpful part of that. So we're trying to balance, we are thinking activities over attendance. And then also there's a phrase I heard, making the office a magnet rather than a mandate, and trying to make people want to come back in. We definitely see that early career folks who are coming out of university or early in their career really want to be in person; they're trying to build community, they're trying to learn how to work, and that's beginning to pull in some more senior folks as well. So we're just working out how to respond to that. Our downtown Merchandise Mart digital facility, we're just redoing some of the layout there to accept that the office is being used differently and try to rebalance dedicated head-down space from more collaborative open space and how to balance that out so that all those use cases are supported.

Yeah, and in my career I've seen companies that are two years old that have their needs addressing. I think Granger we have thrived over the years by actually innovating multiple times, and we've been early into quite a few trends. We were early into the internet, early into automation in the distribution centers, and so on, and that's helped propel us forwards. But the benefits of those tend to taper off, so you've got to keep looking at what's the next curve and how do we keep driving ourselves forwards. That's one of the reasons I came on board three and a half years ago, because Granger was already beginning to look at how to expand our approach, how to leverage technology well. One big piece of that was getting better at building our own software in places where we thought we were differentiated and had the right and the scale to be advantaged. So one big chunk of our modernization is really learning how to build custom software to drive better and more advantaged business processes. So there's a big focus on that. And then the other piece is looking across our whole landscape of how do we modernize that and how do we make it operate faster, support all the volume that's coming through, make it more reliable, more secure, and manageable at a better cost point. So really my job is trying to do both those things at once: how do we drive net new advantage for the business and help us keep taking market share, and then how do we modernize the totality of our ecosystem at the same time. So it's trying to do those two things at once that keeps me pretty busy.

Yeah, cybersecurity is, as everyone is aware, becoming more and more important. I've been trying to help our leadership team make sure they understand it's not just a compliance activity, it's not just trying to hit a checklist and hit some scores, but to understand in the same way that it's a competitive sport. In the same way that we're competing against our competitors in the well-regulated world, there's also a set of less well-regulated competitors who are trying to steal data or interrupt our operations, and they are getting better funded and more motivated and better equipped. We've been doing a few things to try to improve on the cybersecurity side to sort of keep up with these attackers. Two major pieces, maybe it's three. One is really how we build security into what we're doing. So as we're modernizing our systems, as we're providing more automation, better infrastructure automation, better software automation, better network automation, that's a great hook in which to put cybersecurity tooling, whether it's making sure we've got all the right tooling on all of our infrastructure and devices, or whether it's using software delivery pipelines to hook in security scans and so on. I think those things track together, this whole DevSecOps approach of how to integrate security into development and operations leveraging automation. That's one big piece. So we're really looking at how do those things come together, how do we get multiple wins from a similar investment of modernizing our tools and practices. The other big piece is around how the security teams and other teams show up and making sure they're super collaborative. That's a two-way piece. Our infosec cybersecurity teams have been doing a lot of work to work out how they get out of their tower and really collaborate with other teams, and really had a big shift in culture to be a very collaborative and educational group. And then part of my job is to make sure every other team understands the importance that they play in making sure that we're as secure as we can be, making sure that everyone understands that security is their responsibility as well. I think we're seeing this great collaborative approach between our security teams and the rest of our technology and operational teams, and that's underpinned by our sort of modernization across the board. So those are two of the major things we're trying to do there.

Yeah, there's multiple things, but I think one of the most interesting pieces is I mentioned how we've been on this custom software road map, and that's really our product development road map where we are intentional and long term about the advantage we're building. The focus there, our CEO probably says it's pretty simple: our job is to understand our products and our customers better than anyone else and match them together. So we've made some pretty long-term investments in how we understand our product information and our customer information, and those are big areas where we've been focused on our custom approaches. The lesson there is, as we're building custom software, our job and actually my peer our chief product officer Brown Walker's job particularly is to spend time with the business partners and say, for this area of operations, how might you want to operate if you were unconstrained by the current technology that we have? And challenge them a few times to sort of think more broadly and more aggressively about that. So then as they rework some of the business processes, some of the standard work, we build custom technology to support that, and then we get into this nice dance of they go, 'Ah, now I'm learning that I can actually improve the process this way,' we build technologies and tools to support that. We're in this nice flywheel of improved operations and improved website and experience, and that's part of the flywheel of this product development. But what we're really seeing is the beneficial side effect of that is better data, and that is advantage data, proprietary data that is our understanding of our products, our suppliers, our customers, and how we provide them advantage. So we really think that our focus on driving better business outcome through this custom product-driven software approach creates better data for us.

So then there's all the questions of actually how do you get that data to the right places. There's a bit of a pull from what are the use cases, and that's where we've been growing our analytical and data science capabilities over multiple years to leverage data to give our customers and our team members better insights or better outcomes. What information do our customers need to run their business better? Because we actually can help them think about how their operations are across multiple locations, provide them some benefit there. We've been investing in things like computer vision so we can actually with your phone identify, 'Hey, what is this product? I need a replacement, it broke.' So getting much better at doing that. So we've gained some of the skills that are now the pull for better data: you want better product information, better customer information to feed into that. And now we're looking at one of the mechanics of making sure we get this advantage data we're creating to the places where we want it, and we're doing some of the usual investments in the data platform and data foundations there. Beginning to look at the emerging spaces around machine learning operations about actually how you reliably take new models, get them in front of customers, but then get the feedback loop so as you get feedback you can learn and adjust and improve those models over time. That's one big area. And then I think there's always a human layer. For some of the more complex, advanced, derived, aggregated data sets, making sure we've got the right ownership on them. We've seen this product ownership view of software being really helpful to drive what we're building, what's our long-term thesis, what do our internal or external customers need. We're driving the same now around internal product data assets, to get some level of product management, product thinking around this data set as an internal asset. It's got various people who want things from it, what's the road map for improving that. So product ownership is some of the thinking around that sort of data mesh thinking of data product management that's beginning to be useful for us.

Yeah, and like everyone, we still have some work to do. I quite often say I think it's a William Gibson quote: 'The future's already arrived, it's just unevenly distributed.' So we have some very advanced areas with this sort of computer vision areas and data science areas where we think and actually how we're doing search, we think we're using some pretty advanced techniques, but we've got a pretty broad business so we still have our work to make sure that we get everything where we want it to be. But in terms of the opportunities coming out of AI or advanced data science, there's some interesting things happening. We think we're well positioned because we've made these investments into fundamental data assets that we think are really important for us. We think we're a long way down that path, so that's a really good input. And then we think we've got a pretty good thesis about what's important for our customers, about how we make getting the products they need super simple, and then how we can give them some insights and some tangible value into how they operate their business. So we've got some of the data assets, we've got some thesis around how we provide value, and we've got some of the skill sets to start executing on that. So we're looking at some of the use cases where that might be useful, where some of the AI approaches might help. How can that help with making sure that we have all the right information for our customer service teams, for example, to make sure they can serve our customers well? Also looking at lots of internal areas where we might be able to leverage data science to improve our processes. Software engineering is one of those, and I think there's plenty of areas that we're experimenting with where we see the ability for our teams to get more productive and more effective. Happy to talk more about that.

Yeah, so because as we're seeing this inflection point, and it definitely is an inflection point of a movement around particularly generative AI, of the potential for it and the excitement and some hype around it, people are asking, 'Is it like the internet or is it like mobile, the iPhone?' And maybe it's a little bit of both. Personally, I see it a little bit more like the advent of the iPhone and the mobile application ecosystem that came with that. I remember being pretty involved at the time, and everyone was excited. I was working for a tech consulting company, and all of our customers they wanted the shiny app, and we were thinking how much does this app cost, and you could work out okay, some iOS devs and how much time that would take. But really what it drove was deeper down the ecosystem. The app was the tip of the iceberg; everything underneath it pushed people to have real-time APIs that they may not have had, APIs that can actually execute transactions, and then the infrastructure to support real-time all the time people are accessing via mobile. So the app was the pretty easy piece; getting your data and your APIs and your real-time infrastructure in place was the harder bit for mobile. It feels similar for AI. A nice conversational layer that can understand humans and interact with them is not necessarily the easy piece, although our friends at OpenAI and Microsoft, Google and others are making it easier and easier. But making sure you have the data to feed into it and then the ability to execute out the other side, the right APIs and the right transactional capabilities, is some of the harder work. So yeah, I see it more similar to mobile, that we're really pushing into a different way of interacting. And actually, maybe even to stretch that, mobile changes how we interact: we interact by pointing and with touch screens. I think a lot of what we're seeing out of generative AI is a different way of interacting, interacting conversationally in a sort of human language way. So finally the chatbots are here and they're a bit more real. So that's how I look at that one.

Yeah, as an organization we think it's really important. One of our first priorities is start with the customer, really understand the customer problem, because our job is to make their problems go away. Nearly all of our customers, they don't really want to care about do I have enough inventory in my maintenance or repair or operations groups; they want that to be a problem they don't have to think about. So we take that on for them. So we've got to understand their business to understand how to make those problems disappear. So making sure we go visit our customers, visit our operations regularly, is a big thing we're pushing inside the Technology Group as well as across the whole organization. Interestingly, as we're looking across the business of this return to office, we're pushing to be a little bit less headquarters-centric and make sure that people get out into the field. So we're looking at, sure, there's a certain amount of home remote time, but you need some in-office time, but you need some in-the-field time as well to go understand customers. So I think I take a few things. One, just taking some motivation: getting people motivated about the customers we're serving and why it's important is vital. So there's just a little bit of that empathy and motivation for the work we're doing that always comes in whenever I go on a customer visit. Actually, I was in Seattle a few months ago and seeing the diversity of the customers we support in terms of motivation. One was a downtown housing provider often for the unhoused, and so the work they were doing was super essential and super hard, and the problems they had were quite low level: how do I patch this wall or how do I repair this faucet? And then went to see a very high-end modern energy company who had some super high-end almost science fiction problems. But they all needed the same set of products. So I think one piece is getting the motivation for why we're working.

And the other piece is just really trying to understand what makes their lives easier, so how we show up. Some of that is similar to consumer retail: you've got to have a good website and a good ability to confidently find the right products. But we have to go a step beyond; we have to work out how do we integrate deeply into these often big companies' procurement systems, or how do we deploy inventory management or vending machines to make sure it's super easy for our customers, then how do we make sure we've got the right products there. So just sort of getting deeper and deeper into what each of our customers really need is a good takeaway to understand what to focus on as a technologist. The flip side is we have so many customers, it's so broad, that you can over-index on one specific problem. So some of what we have to do is sort of step back a couple of layers and say across our customers, what are the investments that are really going to help all of them, and really sort of raise all those boats rather than just fixating on 'I'm going to solve this one specific customer problem.' But that's probably actually a benefit of how we go to market. We have technology and team members, and we operate this high-touch model which means we can have team members going to visit customers supported by technology. So what's the interplay between those two? It's often not just a technology solution; we're trying to give superpowers to our team members so they can actually go help our customers better, and that can fill in the gaps of where systems really support our customers but where actually we need a human layer to smooth out those gaps across the diversity of the people we're supporting.

Well, I took a slightly windy path. I think I'm old enough that computer science wasn't necessarily one of the biggest university courses when I was growing up in the UK. I do actually recommend people taking a slightly windy path through their technology journeys. Some people try to move very fast, have a plan for exactly where they want to get to, and I think taking some time to spread out and get a diversity of experience is super important. That's actually something inside Granger we try to support people rotating through different areas. My path was probably windier than most. Started out with Latin and Greek literature, language and philosophy, and detoured via law. I was actually more interested in how computers supported massive documents in case management, and became more interested in the computers than actually in the law. But then navigated through technology through a range of areas. I was involved in the UK London startup scene in the late '90s, early 2000s, so learned a lot there around not just the tech but finances and raising money, about dealing with customers, dealing with innovation, running a business. I had a bit of roundedness there. Went through a tech consulting company that gave me a range of technologies and a range of customers, and actually spent quite a while on the West Coast based in San Francisco where I was supporting enterprises and tech companies and some startups. I used to joke that a lot of what I was focused on was, as startups or smaller companies hit an inflection point as they were trying to hit a human organizational and an architectural scaling point often at the same point, how would we help them grow up? What are the practices technically and organizationally they needed to scale? And then on the flip side, looking at bigger enterprises who wanted to leverage some of that startup tech goodness, I used to joke we would help them loosen up. So it's helping the startups grow up and helping the enterprises loosen up. But I really believe there's a sweet spot of how you organize teams so they can fit into the overall vision and understand what they're doing, have the good tooling to give them leverage, but have a reasonable amount of autonomy to do their best work. So maybe just coming back full circle to how you motivate technologists is kind of the same whether it's across really smallish startup tech companies or much bigger enterprises. That's some of the magic we're trying to create at Granger: bring that feeling of doing your work and working quickly that you might get out of a startup or a tech company, but doing that in a well-supported 96-year-old company on a mission that we think is really important.

Thanks so much, Peter. Really enjoyed it.