A CTO who jumped from the grocery business to high fashion reveals how tech leaders can push a data-driven agenda to achieve big changes in any industry
"Tech-driven strategy is very common when it's a tech company," Nanavati said. That's different than at consumer-focused companies like retailers when tech goes from being an "institutional arm to being a strategy arm."
To help navigate that shift, Nanavati tries to instill a culture of "extreme ownership" in his team. That means thinking about problems and solutions from the lens of the business owner and, in Moda's case, taking an approach that many software engineers and other tech workers may not be used to. "In our case, [the job] is truly cross-functional because you have to be able to understand the fashion designers, your merchandising team, and not just have an engineering mindset," he said. "You have to think like an owner and you have to be able to connect the dots from the consumer perspective and the business owner perspective.
To try to overcome those issues, Moda localizes decision-making. The company forms what it calls "squads," or small teams that include representatives from different parts of the business, including sales and IT. Those groups physically sit together in the office and are empowered to make decisions and act on them without explicit buy-in from the top brass.
Companies will take different approaches to changing the culture to one focused on big data and advanced tech. Ultimately, however, executives need to find ways to marry the expertise of the engineering team with customer insight that is often siloed in other parts of the business to craft solutions that actually improve the consumer experience.
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