Using Data and Building Trust; Customer Relationships in E-Commerce

Mike Mulligan, Director of Customer Identity & Data at Zalando, joins Janine in the studio to explain what’s meant by customer identity, as well as the importance of building customer trust.

First up, Mike unpacks Zalando's approach to customer data and explains why data is the key to building deep customer relationships in e-commerce. Like any relationship, it needs to be personal and built on trust.

Mike and Janine also discuss how Zalando has adapted to new working environments and Mike shares his thoughts on productivity, innovation and collaboration in the workplace.

Mike’s three “Pieces of Me” show his his belief in the power of teams, the link between his own career and his ancestor’s work as Stone Masons, and the importance of daring to fail.

To find out more about careers like Mike's at Zalando visit jobs.zalando.com

Transcript

JANINE (00:03.31)

Hello and welcome to Piece of Me, the podcast by Zalando. I'm Janine Matos, your host and Senior Portfolio Manager for Zalando Technology Foundation here at Zalando. In each episode, I welcome an inspirational expert from Zalando to take a deep dive into the fashion and tech retail industry. They also share lots of practical tips and what you should dare to do more to help you on your own career and work journey. By the way, if you're interested in careers at Zalando, click the link to our job page in the show notes.

Each guest brings in three items as they reveal their motivation, stories, and what they've learned along the way. A piece that is close to their heart, one from their career and one from their time at Zalando. Let's get started by meeting my guest for today, who is Mike Mulligan, the Acting Director of Product and Customer Identity and Assortment. Hi, Mike. I'm so glad you're finally here and made it to Berlin. 

MIKE

Yeah, I'm happy to be in Berlin. I like getting over here. I just love the city. I love history, so this city is just seeped in it. So I just love getting around the city. So let's go a step back. 

JANINE

We are in Berlin. That means you do not work for the Berlin Hub. 

MIKE

That's true. I work in the Dublin Tech Hub. We have a couple of tech hubs around Europe, Zurich, Helsinki, and Dublin are the biggest. And I've been in the Dublin office five years and been in Atlanta five years. And I kind of love it there. It's been one of the most rewarding companies I've worked for. It's kind of real cool after many years working for American multinationals, working for a European company. It's just different vibe. 

JANINE

So I've heard I've never worked for an American company, but yeah, I have heard that there are differences. 

MIKE

Let's put it this way. The European-ness of Zalando, it's in our DNA. It's everything we do. There's this European flavour to it. Europe is like pretty chilled. 

JANINE

And you have been always in product at Zalando and also before? 

MIKE

So I've been a product manager for 20 years or so. And, now, I interview product managers all the time and there's like this rigorous process of going through like five, six interviews to really know if they've got the chops. In my case, when I started being a product manager from being an engineer, literally I was talking to our head of product and he said, we've just lost a product manager. Do you want to do that? And the week later I was a product manager. No skills or learning. was just like, let's see what happens. Product management is a new capability anyway. It's a new job profession.

So back then it was kind of, we were still making it up. 

JANEIN

And nowadays there's way more requirements?

MIKE

Yeah. Now like there is a rigour to it and there is like a set of skills that you're expected to know and have. Back then we didn't know what the skills were. It was just somebody who filled in the gaps between engineering and marketing and the customer. Now we kind of have a much clearer idea of what we do in product and are able to explain it to our parents and our family as well, which I couldn't do years ago.

JANINE

But as you told me before, you actually moved area, some product, and you're now in customer identity and assortment. What does this mean? What do you do or your team? 

MIKE

So one of the things internally in Zalando, and sometimes it surfaces as well, is internally in Zalando, we have a digital platform and it's divided into domains. There's a customer domain, assortment domain, transaction domain. And I run the customer domain. And the way that I always tell people who say like, sum it up in the sentences, any piece of customer data that comes through Zalando usually goes to my teams. And we feel a certain duty of care towards that data. If customers trust us with their data, it's our job to honour that trust. Our job is to protect it and serve. A CEO told me about 10 years ago and I didn't get it then, but I got it a year after and he came and talked to the product team back then said, the most important featureof any product is your customer's trust. 

If they don't trust you as a company, if they don't trust you, they're not going to give you your data and they're not going to use your services. So he actually, at the time, he stopped every other feature development to make sure we were developing features that promoted trust. And it stuck with me because he took a lot of flack for that. some of the customers saying, hey, we want this latest juicy feature. And he was like, no. But a few years later, it was just so much the return on that feature investment because suddenly customers realised they became much more aware of how much your data is out there. And it's important that you can trust the company you're doing business with. 

It actually took me back to something like my dad was a milkman. He went around house to house delivering milk to people. And the reason people shopped there because they could have gone to the store and got their milk. It's like they knew the guy, they trusted him. (04:52.526)

You can be the fanciest online business scaling, serving 50 million customers, or you can be serving five. It really comes down to do the customers trust. And so it's something I really try to instil in the team. 

JANINE

I mean, if I go shopping online nowadays, you Google for something and there are some specific shops that appear right away on top, which because I don't trust them with my data, I will not be shopping there. 

MIKE

And it operates in so many levels. there’s The pure data aspect, you trust. But think about fashion. You go to your family and say, do I look good in this or does this suit me? You got to trust what they're saying because if they're just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. You're not going to wear it, right? So this trust thing, it's something that I feel very strongly about because I think it's the core of what we do. It allows us to do the cool stuff because if they don't trust us, they don't give us their data. If they don't give us their data, we can't.

Like we have this huge selection. There's no way you'll find everything. It relies on us being able to put the right assortment in front of you. And it actually was the thing that brought me to Zalando actually. The previous version of the strategy came out around 2019 when I joined and it had this phrase in it that struck me, deep customer relationships. And for an online retailer, that was radical I thought, because online retail, it's like, we'll sell you something, we get it to you, it's convenience -based, it's transaction -based. But here was Zalando coming saying, we want to have a relationship.

And any relationship you have from a personal relationship to friends, to work colleagues, you need to get to know people. You need to build that trust. Just on the product side, that's such a cool idea. How do you have a deep relationship with 50 million people? How do you do that? That's what we spend most of our days trying to figure out. I've said this many times, are about six or seven fundamental challenges in product in Zalando. And one of them is how do know 50 million people?

Then it's like, how do you get the products to 50 million people? How do you get the right size and fit for 50 million people? There's only about six or seven real problems in online retail today. Everything else kind of flows from those. But this, I really resonated with that idea of a deep customer relationship. It's not just give us your money, we'll give you some sneakers. It's like, we really are in it for the long haul and that means we have to do right by you. How is your team set up?

(07:16.404)

Any team that comes to Zalando and says, we want to know X about a customer. Let's say the beauty team wants to know what's your favourite hair products. They come to us and said, like, we're thinking of saying, we need to get this data so we know your favourite conditioner is X. And our first question we always get back to them is, do we have a good reason for asking the customer this? Is this something that we're really going to do? And that's actually not even needs to come from us. I come from things like GDPR, the compliance and the use very good.

You must have a really good reason for asking customer for data. You can't just hover up data on the off chance that, this might be useful someday. So when a team comes to us, like any of the beauty team or the designer team says, we want to know something about the customer. Our job is to try and make sure we've got a way to get that data from the customer. Now either we can ask the customer, please tell us, or we also have a lot of data about the actions. Like if you keep looking at a pair of Nike sneakers, nine times out of 10. we can make a good guess that you like Nike. 

So there are ways we can understand you as a customer, but underpinning all of that is if a customer came to us and had a concession with us and said, you're using this data, would we be embarrassed to tell them about it? Because you got to say, yes, we saw the last 10 things you bought because that allowed us to put a pair of Nikes in front of you. And we did that because we believed it helped you. If you didn't, we want to make it as easy for you to say, hey, don't do that.

So when the teams like beauty or designer or sports come to a set, we want to know if this person's a runner or if this person plays soccer or football, then it's our job to kind of help them navigate that. Knowing all of that compliance stuff, that's a whole world unto itself. And so our job is to try and navigate them through that in a way to sort of say, yes, you're asking for the data in the right way. We can store it. Like one of the aphorisms we have is like protect and serve. Our job is to protect that data, make sure it honours the customer, and then serve that to the teams that need it who are building awesome experiences. So it's a very collaborative role the team has. 

The way I usually describe it is any piece of customer data that comes to Zalando flows through our systems. I'm very passionate about this idea that the customer comes first and their wishes get honoured.

JANINE (09:35.118)

We still have the three pieces that you brought. 

MIKE

The personal piece I brought, I'll preface that by saying one of the restrictions is I had to make sure I could get them on a plane. The personal piece I brought is my grandfather's Union card, his 1948 Union card. The reason I brought that is I am a huge family history geek. And this piece of me is really a piece of a piece of me because I have like this huge box at home of family memorabilia going back hundreds of years.

All of my ancestors on the, on my father's like very traditional, all of my female ancestors housewife because that was Ireland. But all my male ancestors, 95 % fall into two categories. One  is farmer, no surprise there, or two builder. My father's side, were stone masons. My grandfather and my mother's side was also a builder and it's his union card. And I can go around Dublin and see the houses that he worked on. They still exist like 67 years later.

I can go to my great-great-grandfather worked on the local church that I used to be an altar boy in, hey, he helped build that. I can actually go put my hand on stones that he may have actually put on the church. So this union card, it's the bricklayers union. And something I often think about is they built these things to last decades, centuries in some cases. I'm a software builder. I'm actually following that family tradition of being a builder.

Now, if you get five years out of the software you build, it's a success. I've built some great products in the past, but they're gone. My grandfather built houses in the 40s and the 50s that are still standing in Dublin. My ancestors from the 1700s, they worked on some of the big houses in Dublin. They're still there 200, 300 years later. And that's just an awesome legacy. But I still feel connected to them in this sort of sense of I build stuff. It's just software. 

JANINE

Can you explain what is actually a union card?

MIKE

It is a small card, credit card size, and it has the name of the union on the front. This one's quite old and tattered actually. And inside the card, it has his union fees. I don't know Irish old money. They had shillings and pence back then, but he paid money every month and these were his union dues. And then the union, know, if there was a discussion with the manager, whatever the union would represent them. So he was part of the brick and stone layers union. And this is a 1948 card.

(11:57.326)

He retired when he was 70. He was going up ladders till he was 70 and the foreman at the side said, you got to slow down Pat, because he loved working. And that work ethic as well came true from my grandfather as well. And I really like seeing or hearing that, I mean, nowadays unions are also a big topic, companies having them, works council.

Work cancel is probably the closest equivalent to the union. And seeing that back in the days, there was already a union, people coming together to make sure that payments, maybe human rights in certain jobs, some kind of security work security was in place. The other thing it always represents to me is the union also was a guild. It was considered a craft. 

I'm very clumsy with my hands, but I remember as a kid with my grandfather when he was working on fixing something up around the house, whatever, he would always make sure, and he would tell me this, to line up the screws with the screwdriver so they always pointed the same way. How many of us today, we just screw something in from IKEA and if it fits, it fits. He would spend time to make sure they all lined up the same way. And there was this attention to craft that I know from like, all the way back to my ancestors, this stonemasons craft. 

You can't just learn stuff in a book. You have to spend time on your craft. I think of that as a product manager. I tell my product managers, yes, you can go to this online training thing. All of these guys do great courses, but there is a craft that can only be learned over time. And that's as well what this represents to me. Being in the union signified your commitment to the craft.

JANINE (13:48.696)

So your second item. My work item. And I don't know if there's any way to really describe this except to say that it's a mobile coat hanger. So my first real job, formative job was working in Nokia. lived in Finland for five years. And this is something I got in my time at Nokia. And to explain it, I have to kind of take a step back to my childhood. As a kid, I was really didn't fit in. I was socially awkward, a real geek, didn’t really know how to express myself all that well, but my hero was Einstein. I loved all the scientists. love Dirac, love Bohr, all of these guys. So like I read the theory of relativity when I was 12, he was able to explain the ideas so easy. So Einstein was like one of my heroes. Einstein worked in the patent office in Bern before he went on to kind of really blow up and become famous. And somehow I associated the idea of patents as a sign that you have achieved it. And Nokia used to get these weird things and they say on the front, Nokia inventor, when you had your first patent. And to this day, my first patent is one of the highlights of my career. The idea that I got a patent somehow in my mind said, now you can call yourself an inventor. 

Now you actually know how to make things. And all of the other achievements I get,I really celebrate them, but my patents are something like this private joy I always get. A patent is at least in principle, it is that you have an idea that is unique and has never been thought of before. So what was your first patent? It was a mechanism for taking an internet page and making so that could be put onto a mobile phone. 

Bear in mind, this was 2000. You didn't have touch screen. You didn't have fast bandwidth, you had monochrome pictures, black and white screens, and you had to take the latest news and somehow shrink it into something that was the size of a postage stamp. And the patent was related to that process. And to this day, I don't think I could explain it to anybody except that I know it was novel and different. That's the word they always use with patents is it must be novel. It's something that has not been seen before. You talked about 2000, that means it was like Nokia 3310 and those kinds of phones.

JANINE (16:13.644)

What data would you be able to store in that time? 

MIKE

Pretty much nothing. Nowadays we're all mobile first in our design and everything. The only things you could really do on a webpage back then is you had a button that could go up or down. Every time you had to click something, you lost half your customers when you were building webpages. So being able to shrink a page and still make it legible and usable on a mobile device back then, that was a challenge.

JANINE (16:47.662)

So Mike, what's your Zalando related item? 

MIKE

So my Zalando related item is technically digital. So I have a printout of an article. First big project I worked on when I came to Zalando was the pre -owned proposition. So I was a product lead for that. And for anyone who's not familiar, Zalando uses the working backwards process. And working backwards, you start with a press release. So you write fiction, you manifest what it will look like when you've launched and you've solved all of your customers' problems and the world is awesome. So it takes a bit of getting used to because you got to feel comfortable writing what sounds like made up stories, but they actually serve a real purpose. So we wrote a press release for the pre -owned proposition. Fast forward a few months to we launched pre -owned and we launched in September. And then I get a ping from Jade who was working on the project with me Vogue picked us up. I'm like, you what?

Now I came to Zalando knowing nothing about fashion. I still, many would argue, know very little about fashion. I've kind of picked it up over the years to osmosis, but I knew what Vogue was. And Vogue were running a piece on Zalando Pre-Owned. was like, what's happening? So this article is the Vogue article about the launch of Zalando Pre -Owned. And it actually follows a lot of the writing that we had in our press release. So to me, it's like, this is from a product management point of view, classic textbook case of you write your press release and you see the end result but also it's Vogue. 

You don't get much higher in the fashion world of Vogue. so it was like, we made it. We hit exactly what we wanted to do with Pre-owned as a proposition. We hit the market. We made a splash. Full disclosure here, the article doesn't quite give the same spin we had because we were like, we're the first, we're the best. And the article goes, Zalando's out here, but so are all these other people. So it's more realistic perhaps.

But we're still there front and center, 21st of September, the resale market in Europe, hots up and Zalando's in at the forefront. I was super proud when I heard that. 

JANINE

Really well said. And before we wrap up, Mike, what would you tell our listeners what they should maybe dare to do more in their career or personal life? 

MIKE

I find myself blanking on that question because it's like so many things, but if I really summed it up, dare to fail. Most software projects fail. Very few of them even get out of the ideas stage. Very few of them even get launched. I tell people if they get something to launch, celebrate that fact, but you only get to that if you dare to fail. And one of the things working with big companies is it gets harder to really live that because you have more to lose. If you're a startup, you can try anything, even nothing to lose. As you get more successful and Zalando is successful, we really have to remind ourselves to dare to fail more often.

But the only failure is not trying. Isn't that what the cliche is? 

JANINE

Well said. And a really good wrap up. Yeah. You will only know if you tried. Thank you so much for being my guest, Mike. 

MIKE

I loved it. I wanted to do this for a while because it's also my chance to hear from my colleagues. So I love the podcast. 

JANINE

Thank you all so much for listening. If you'd like to know more about careers at Zalando, go to jobs.zalando.de. You'll find that link in the show notes or check out our Instagram page, Inside Zalando.

Our next episode is coming in two weeks and I'll be talking to another guest from Zalando about life inside the fashion and tech retail industry. And of course, there are three pieces of me.