I just completed 1-year as a partner at Starbucks. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to work here. It has been a great year for me, my family, my team, and the company.
Starbucks Coffee’s corporate mission is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” Every day I am reminded of the emphasis and value Starbucks Partners place toward people. Everyday in 30000+ Starbucks stores the retail partners serves coffee in a cup with joy in their face. Everyday the Starbucks Technology team operates the technology fabric to enable store operations and servicing of customers’ needs. Everyday the digital platform team, that I am part of, operates the rails for identity, payments, cards, mobile order and pay, data integrations, and contributes to the mission. Everyday we dream about the possibilities and plan the feasible items to develop in the near term horizon. Everyday I have an opportunity to learn, share, and contribute.
Often I am asked the questions:
- So how is it at Starbucks? Great
- What is the culture here? Collaboration
- What problems are you tackling? Many
In two simple words I summarize the culture as “compassionate collaboration”. By this, I mean we have an opportunity to share, listen, discuss, and decide on next steps. On my day 1, my manager handed me a list of 90 people across the company for me to meet and connect with. During the connection meetings, each person shared their personal history and areas of work. These meetings were great ice breakers and eased the communication and continuous connections. Starbucks calls employees as ‘Partners’ and indeed that shows through in discussions. I approached my first few weeks with the Appreciate, Listen, Inspire (ALI) mindset. As weeks rolled by I was able to find opportunities to engage and contribute to projects big and small. My team and I were able to work with many other technology, business, marketing, retail operations, and finance teams to take on projects and complete the same with quality.
Every company has unique attributes. Starbucks has strong retail presence. Thanks to an initiative from our CTO, all the VPs also started participating and working at retail stores for a few hours. Through these store immersions, I learnt more about how a retail store operates. I learnt how the store partners handle numerous tasks and also serve the customer with smile in their faces. Internally we talk about bringing joy to store partners, and indirectly joy to the customers. Indeed that requires higher level of engagement from everyone at the retail stores and the support center (Starbucks headquarters).
Starbucks is growing its technology presence. My team is composed of engineers and technical product managers. They came from many different companies and diverse background. They bring passion and persistence to solve problems. I worked with my Directors to craft Directional Roadmaps for various systems. Working with our Architecture team, we developed conceptual and detailed flow diagrams. Working with finance team we shaped the strategy and funding as needed. Working closely with business teams we created needs assessments and refined the go to market plans. Working with other technology teams my platform team was able to use the APIs and tools to contribute to several projects. With multiple inputs the team takes a collection of disparate systems to build a coherent whole delivering on two week sprint rhythms. Recruiting and Partner Resources (our HR Team) have been helping us to build stronger and cohesive team. We expanded hiring to include early in career professionals. We engaged deeply with select external vendors to understand and use latest technologies in our platform. See more on careers and jobs here. We engaged deeply with external vendors to learn and use latest technologies in our platform. This is a journey and the work continues on with focus on building stronger foundation and richer experiences.
Scale is natural for Starbucks. With 30,000+ stores, millions of customers visiting the stores every day, Starbucks serves billions of orders per year. At peak times, the digital systems handle millions of requests and concurrent completed transactions are in the thousands per second. At an average transaction order level below the $10, our transaction volume is significantly higher than most other merchants. As my prior SVP used to say, our business is ephemeral too. Users order for drinks are for fresh drink at that present moment. If a user is unable to place the order at say 6:34AM, it is very unlikely that they will order the same coffee at 8:45PM in the evening or the next day. That is not true for any of your other online merchant selling packaged goods. So besides scale, we also focus on reliability and latency. Over the past years we built stronger culture and practice on measuring and improving our systems, directly resulting in better business outcomes as well as better work / life balance in the team.
Community engagement and Sustainability are important facets of work life at Starbucks. Within the first three months of my start of work here, I joined tens of new partners to volunteer in a community organization (Food Lifeline of Seattle). Since then I had done group volunteering almost once every quarter. Just recently I had my leadership team collectively volunteer together as well after a team offsite. With its scale, Starbucks can and has been contributing deeply to communities and also has adopted strong sustainability mission. More at Stories.Starbucks.
There is more learn, more to shape, and more to experiment, deliver, and hence grow the business. All along I am positive that the customers will be central to our mission. The store partners will continue to nurture the customers with joy. Thanks to my team and my peers for helping me get through the first year at Starbucks.
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