Target

For the exclusive use of J. Lee, 2019.
CASE: SM-308
DATE: 10/02/18
TARGET: CREATING A DATA-DRIVEN PRODUCT

MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATION
Target Corporation, the second-largest discount retailer in the United States, began as a “dry
goods” store in Minnesota in 1902. By 2017, with annual sales of almost $72 billion, Target had
become a retail juggernaut. Each week the company served more than 50 million shoppers
online, as well as upwards of 30 million people who visited its more than 1,800 stores.
By the end of 2017, like many large enterprises, Target was a few years into its journey of better
leveraging data, technology and advanced mathematical models to enhance all facets of its
business – from back-end processes to how it marketed and merchandised products to customers.
The person responsible for overseeing the company’s data and analytics efforts, Paritosh Desai,
did so from a small office building near the Caltrain stop in Sunnyvale, California.
Desai had joined Target in 2013, and shortly thereafter was tasked to build and lead a new group
called EDABI, which stood for Enterprise Data, Analytics and Business Intelligence. Created in
2015, the group was conceived to support the vision of Target becoming a company that would
use data to drive decision-making on what products to sell, how to optimize supply chains, how
to better position products, and, perhaps most importantly, how to combine its online and offline
activities. In May 2017, Desai was named chief data and analytics officer, reporting directly to
Target’s chief operating officer, and while initially EDABI focused on creating data reports and
doing online A/B testing, by early 2018 it had grown into a 900-person organization that
developed its own tools and algorithms for the company.
David Kingbo (MSM ’18) and Lecturer Robert Siegel prepared this case as the basis for class
discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative
situation.
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This document is authorized for use only by Jaemin Lee in IT Strategy Seminar Course Pack II taught by HO GEUN LEE, Yonsei University from Aug 2019 to Jan 2020.
Target: Creating a Data-Driven Product Management Organization SM-308 p. 2
With a focus on building an organization that could compete against its equivalent at Amazon or
Google in either’s cloud, machine language, and artificial intelligence capabilities, EDABI was
now confronting many decisions needed to accelerate the pace of change at the company and
attract additional talent to the Target team.
THE RETAIL INDUSTRY IN THE UNITED STATES
In 2018, the retail business in the United States represented $5.7 trillion in annual sales.1 Due to
its enormous size, the industry was extremely competitive, and most participants had low
margins on the products that they sold. A few retailers dominated the industry but served
different customer demographics. Target and Costco attempted to serve higher-income
customers (e.g., with average annual income of over $80,000 when shopping for groceries) who
sought quality brands at competitive prices. These two retail behemoths positioned their stores
in wealthier suburbs and in dense and developed urban areas. The other large physical retailer in
the United States, Walmart, focused its efforts on lower-income shoppers (e.g., household
incomes of less than $70,000 when shopping for groceries).2,3 With annual sales of over $480
billion, Walmart was considered one of the top global players in retail performance.
The other major player in the United States retail market was Amazon, the online retail pioneer
with global annual sales of almost $178 billion in 2017—and over $120 billion in the United
States that year.4,5 With its leading market position and services across retail, digital media, and
with its popular Prime Service, which provided home delivery of millions of items within two
days at no delivery charge, the company had substantively reshaped how Americans purchased
products at retail (see Exhibit 1.)
TARGET – A BRICK AND MORTAR DISCOUNT RETAILER
Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the company was originally known as the Dayton Dry
Goods Company. The Target brand first launched in 1962 and expanded aggressively during the
1990s when the company opened many new store formats under the Target name. The company
officially changed its name to the Target Corporation in 2000, and by 2017 it had over 350,000
employees and was one of the largest corporations in the United States.
1
Kimberly Amadeo, “July Retail Sales Up an Amazing 6.4 Percent From Last Year,”
The Balance, August 14, 2018,
https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-retail-sales-statistics-and-trends-3305717 (August 19, 2018).
2
“Who Shops Where for Groceries,” infographic, https://www.fungglobalretailtech.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/Who-Shops-Where-for-Groceries-A-Look-at-US-Grocery-Store-Demographics-
Infographic.pdf (June 24, 2018).
3
“Who Shops Where for Groceries,” 2018 Coresight Research,
https://www.fungglobalretailtech.com/research/shops-groceries-look-us-grocery-store-demographics/
(June 24, 2018).
4
Daniel Keyes, “Amazon captured 4% of US retail sales in 2017,” Business Insider, January 9, 2018,
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-captured-4-of-us-retail-sales-in-2017-2018-1 (June 24, 2018).
5
Annual net sales of Amazon in selected leading markets from 2014 to 2017, Statista,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/672782/net-sales-of-amazon-leading-markets/ (August 9, 2018).
Becoming Digital – First Steps
Target launched its first e-commerce web platform in 1999, and in 2011 launched an updated
website when it assumed full control of its online operations (see Exhibit 2). With this update,
Target incorporated several advanced features for its time:
 Personalized shopping: The company’s website offered customers product

recommendations, enhanced gift and wedding registries, and social networking
integration.
 Advanced design: The site contained bold graphics and playful photos, extensive
buying guides, and expert advice on products.
 Easy navigation: The website included advanced search and navigation,
consistent product information, online customer service, and a streamlined
shopping cart and checkout process.
The platform had been built with the support of many third parties including IBM, Infosys, and
others. But as online shopping became prevalent, Target decided that the company needed to
become a digital expert and develop more of its own technology to support its e-commerce
efforts. The company undertook the goal to build strong internal data management, product
management, and e-commerce functions to drive its digital platforms. Although most of the
firm’s sales originated from its in-store activity, the digital portion of Target’s business grew by
over 30 percent per year over the next five years. By mid-2018, sales through the company’s
digital channels represented more than 5 percent of overall revenues (see Exhibit 3).
ENTER EDABI
Prior to 2013, Target had no centralized data governance or internal organization to drive an
overall strategy or to educate the company on the best way to use data. By 2013, however,
Target’s senior leadership began to see the potential for how data and analytics could drive
significant competitive differentiation, and therefore formed a centralized group that was charged
with defining and realizing a data and analytics strategy.
By this time, e-commerce was having an increasingly growing impact on the company. As
online sales expanded, and as consumer behaviors evolved into frequently making purchases of
retail products online, the company realized that it needed to employ data science and analytics
to further drive Target’s online business. Creating a function that would give the organization a
dedicated team to lead these activities with the goal of building an increasingly data-rich
capability that could shape the firm’s e-commerce efforts became a primary objective of senior
leadership.
As the company began to recruit senior talent, an experienced technology company veteran,
Desai was drawn to the opportunity to work for Target. Shared Desai:
The company had a tremendous opportunity to gather data to improve decision

making and how the business was run. And I figured if I could start with helping
the e-commerce activities, longer term there would be an opportunity to impact
the whole organization—in stores, across the supply chain—everywhere. I was
really excited by the company’s brand and the size of the firm, and the
applications that could be created were really unique given Target’s position in
the market.6
A little over 12 months after he joined, EDABI was formed and Desai was put in charge of the
new function. The team was disseminated across several offices across the world; members
were located in Sunnyvale, California; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and
Bangalore, India. EDABI reported directly into the COO of the company, which highlighted
both internally and externally that the team was chartered to impact more than just the firm’s e-
commerce activities (see Exhibit 4 for Target’s organizational structure).
While being spread across the United States and India allowed for the hiring of talent on a global
basis, the geographic distribution of different locations represented a logistical challenge for the
team. As Meghna Sinha, vice president of testing and measurement, explained, “I travel about 60
to 70 percent of the time to Minneapolis, and I live in Orange County, California. But when you
start a new group, you have to invest a lot of time with the colleagues all over the business.”
The leadership of EDABI found that the team typically had two types of interactions with other
Target groups. First, they tended to engage on strategic issues with senior leaders across the
company to see how data could help drive better decision-making. Many of these interactions
focused on conceptual planning issues that looked at both near- and long-term opportunities for
how data could inform decisions of the company.
The second type of engagement was with the operational groups of the company. The EDABI
team frequently would go into stores and the firm’s data centers around the country to
understand how decisions based upon EDABI’s data and algorithms were being implemented.
Desai highlighted that he usually visited about 20 stores per year, in addition to going to 3 to 4
distribution centers. He thus spent a great deal of time working with other organizations and
functions across the entire company.
Growing a Technical Culture Inside of a Retail Company
As EDABI grew, the organization recruited members who possessed deeply quantitative
backgrounds. This was evident at the highest levels of the organization, with Desai having a
PhD in operations research, Tim Sears, vice president of data science and engineering, having a
PhD in machine learning, and Ramasubbu Venkatesh, senior director, data science, having a PhD
in computational physics (see Exhibit 5 for background on key EDABI leaders).
After the creation of EDABI, the group went through an aggressive period of growth and talent
acquisition. It grew to employ more than 50 PhDs in its data science ranks. “We have more PhDs
than many mathematics departments at some universities,” Samir Shah, director of data sciences
and engineering, joked. As the group was starting, it was not easy to recruit top talent—
especially in Silicon Valley. Venkatesh added:
6
Interviews conducted in May 2018 with Paritosh Desai, Tim Sears, Samir Shah, Meghna Sinha, Aarthi Srinivasan,
and Ramasubbu Venkatesh. All quotes are from these interviews.
In retrospect, what helped us was the fact that we had a leadership team that was
highly accomplished and networked in their fields. The leaders were able to reach
through their network and articulate the variety and depth of technical problems
Target had and the opportunity to do both fundamental and impactful work. Once
recruits realized how truly transformational this challenge was, they were hooked.
Building a deeply technical team inside of a traditional retailer created interesting challenges as
EDABI grew in size and scope. As Desai explained, “The more technical the capability that we
started building, the more difficult it was to have conversations with the business teams—the
EDABI analysts oftentimes appear as nerdy or geeky, which is very different than most
traditional retailers.” Shah added:
In many ways much of the machine learning and deep learning-based products
were still a big black box for our business colleagues. Our retail teammates were
not always able to understand why we made some of the recommendations that
we did, and they wanted to understand why we were proposing certain
suggestions. It became clear that we needed to demystify what we did, and we
had to be able to explain how the machine learning algorithms we developed
arrived at the decisions we recommended.
Target also began retooling its workforce to transform capable employees across the company
into data scientists or data engineers. The company sent hundreds of employees to advanced
data training so that they could stay on top of the latest data science technology. In addition, the
EDABI team also stayed current with leading academic research by having frequent onsite
training on machine learning with university faculty members. The company’s data scientists
and engineers were encouraged to attend top conferences in their fields to keep themselves up to
date. As Venkatesh shared, “Desai was particular that the leadership team not only know the
latest developments in the field of machine learning or high-performance computing, but also
have hands-on experience in advanced topics such as deep learning.” Sears noted, “Yep, we did
homework, took our midterm exams, worked on our term projects—we put in 40 hours of work a
week in addition to our day job—and we got graded on the courses.”
Consolidating and Growing EDABI
When Desai joined Target in 2013, the data analytics organization consisted of approximately 90
members and was primarily focused on supporting the company’s e-commerce platform. As
Desai recounted:
Target had been using data for a variety of uncoordinated activities. We operated
in ways that one finds in many organizations: there were different federated
groups that were doing analytics, but hardly or almost no data science to analyze
the data. Therefore, I decided that part of my strategy was to establish a data
science and data engineering function when I joined. Over time, we built that out
into a large, single team. This was accelerated when our senior leadership decided
that developing a data and algorithms capability would be a key differentiator for
Target, and they wanted us to focus across the company—on both online and
offline sales. At that point, teams across the company quickly came together and
became a centralized function in our group.
When EDABI was formed, the organization’s responsibilities evolved to integrate more closely
with other parts of the company. As the function grew, its responsibility changed from simply
performing A/B testing on the company’s website to doing business intelligence (BI) reporting
and providing data governance. In addition, the group began to work on Target’s most strategic
operational challenges:
 Supply chain – EDABI began to engage on stock and inventory management

solutions based not on statistical forecasting, but instead using a more
complex and sophisticated approach using machine-learning algorithms to
predict supply chain accuracy.
 Energy optimization – EDABI showed that its expertise could help beyond
retail sales and be applied to other domains inside of the company. The group
found that by combining models that accounted for weather across the United
States, EDABI could work toward helping Target save between 3 to 5 percent
in energy costs across multiple stores, which could save the organization
millions of dollars per year.
 Digital ads optimization – Target advertised offers from sellers to customers
online when people were looking for specific items on Target’s e-commerce
platforms. EDABI developed a system that helped sellers publish ads at
relevant times to shoppers, providing a digital advertising engine in the
company’s online products.
 Merchandising – At an individual store level, merchandisers historically
displayed and ordered items in a way that they believed would entice
customers to buy products and thus increase revenues. However, EDABI
began using a combination of analytics and machine learning to find optimal
displays at Target’s physical locations.
Since its start in 2015, EDABI was responsible for activities across both the company’s e-
commerce and in-store customer experience. The EDABI team’s data scientists developed the
core algorithms that were used across the various functions of the company, as well as data
engineers who enabled these algorithms to work at scale across the company via the
implementation of application programming interfaces (APIs),7 and also by offering consulting
services that helped the strategic deployment of analytics across the company. In addition, a
business intelligence engineering group inside of EDABI helped ensure that analytical needs of
other functions in the company could be implemented using the data technologies developed by
the EDABI organization.
7
In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of subroutine definitions,
protocols, and tools for building software. In general terms, it is a set of clearly defined methods of communication
between various software components.
INTEGRATION WITH PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
From its beginning, EDABI began to work more closely with the product managers across the
company as the firm sought to personalize the e-commerce user experience (see Exhibits 6-8).
Product recommendations online quickly became critical for the Target e-commerce platform
due to their ability to drive increased sales (recommendations increased annual sales by more
than $100 million in 2017). Product managers, who usually resided in the business groups that
ran both the physical stores and e-commerce activities, began to work with data scientists and
engineers in EDABI to drive improvements of the online and offline experience and drive uplift
of revenues.
As an example of this collaboration, when a customer bought a product on the Target website,
EDABI created a “personalization engine” to allow for enterprise-wide personalization
capabilities. The personalization engine was first deployed on Target’s e-commerce website in
2014 and expanded rapidly to support all of Target’s e-commerce platforms (apps, etc.) and
email marketing. The engine suggested changes to the recommendation windows that were
displayed on a specific product page or at the checkout step based on algorithms. One example
of this capability was how the personalization engine could make suggestions for additional
items to consider purchasing based on what was in the current customer’s shopping basket, due
to a customer’s behaviors and demographics, based on a customer’s previous orders, by
understanding a user’s current browser behavior, by “shopping the look” if the purchased item
was clothing, or by supplying information on other items that guests also purchased when buying
a particular item. In addition, the system could also make recommendations based on sales that
were popular in a customer’s geographic area.
While product managers in the e-commerce and digital product groups were ultimately
responsible for choosing where and which recommendation windows would appear online and at
what point in the user journey these items would appear, each of these options was the result of
different algorithms designed by the data science team at EDABI.
The organization discovered very quickly in its deployment of the personalization engine that
getting the experience right was key to driving higher engagement (and hence higher sales). The
same core set of algorithms were used across all of Target’s e-commerce touch points; the engine
first went live during the 2014 December Holidays on the company’s website, and expanded to
all of Target’s digital footprints—its mobile apps, email marketing, digital ads (on Target.com),
etc., thereafter.
Collaboration Between Product Managers and the Data Team
One of the initial challenges that arose between EDABI and product managers in other groups
was that since each reported into different organizations, creating alignment of incentives
became a challenge.
Shah explained that to reduce diverging interests at the beginning of an engagement, he and
Venkatesh began setting up a joint OKR policy between their teams and the other Target groups.
While EDABI team members believed they were positively influencing the way product
management was being done at Target, they needed to be aligned with the product managers in
order to be effective. As Sears shared:
We are trying to do data science with an actual product management mindset so

that we can incorporate it into the company when we build any solution for the
organization.
Early Product Management/EDABI Collaboration: Cartwheel
In 2014, Target launched a mobile coupon app called Cartwheel (see Exhibit 9). Cartwheel let
customers see what offers were available on the products that they might want to purchase and
pick up in a Target store. When customers were shopping at Target, the app also let customers
scan the bar code of a product with a cellphone camera and collect coupons related to this
product. When customers were ready to check out, they would retrieve all of their Cartwheel
“offers” from one barcode in the app to scan at the register to apply their discounts.
In March 2014 the amount of time that shoppers spent browsing with the app amounted to 100
million hours, and by 2017 Cartwheel had been downloaded more than 40 million times. 8
A short while after Cartwheel’s release, the app development team that made Cartwheel
approached EDABI to understand if something could be done to improve customer redemption
rates of coupons. EDABI conducted several rounds of customer interviews to understand the
end users’ needs, but one of the most valuable insights came out of looking at several standard
measurements of APIs that EDABI had provided to the software development project teams.
According to Sears:
Cartwheel was a standalone app that initially just had offers for customers. But
when our guests would open up the app, it had over 900 different offers in a
random order. It was too confusing for any customer to scroll through the offers
and figure out what they might want. But our team was able to get some data
from each user’s click stream, and by combining that with other sources of data,
we were able to make recommendations that were able to increase redemption
rates of coupons.
THE NEXT PHASE OF EDABI – BEYOND 2018
While EDABI had grown in the three years since it had been formed, by 2018 the team started to
outline next steps to make the organization more effective inside of the company.
Educating the Enterprise on Advanced Data Science Capabilities
While EDABI team members were continuously learning about and working with new
technologies, their colleagues in other parts of the organization did not have the same firsthand
experience with these deep technological capabilities. The EDABI team recognized the
8
Phil Wahba, “Target finds rare tech edge: its popular Cartwheel shopping app,” Fortune, June 5, 2014,
http://fortune.com/2014/06/05/target-cartwheel/ (June 24, 2018).
importance of working closely with their business partners to explore how these innovations
could help Target’s business, while they also understood that such practices needed to be applied
judiciously and in partnership with business teams. As Desai noted, “While AI and ML promise
to increase the efficacy of many merchandising processes, we also worry that we might sacrifice
the ‘art’ of merchandising that has allowed Target to differentiate itself.”
Branding and Business Rules
While data and machine learning had proven its ability to drive additional sales, some of the
recommendations could be at odds with branding guidelines or business objectives. Aarthi
Srinivasan, director of product management and personalization, pointed out:
At one point we created an algorithm that showed customers what they had
previously purchased, and in one case, we promoted groceries on a customer’s
homepage. However, someone from our merchandising team saw this and felt
that we should not have promoted food, which was not on brand with the
designed creatives and were also from a lower revenue and margin category than
other alternatives.
Desai added:
Machine learning applications could lead to some unintended consequences if not

appropriately guided by a sound strategy drawing upon domain knowledge.
Many of the algorithms are blind to core human expectations such as variety of
offerings, prices, forms, etc.
Ethics
An important challenge for EDABI and everyone in the company was to entice customers to
purchase recommended products, but also to be wary not to cross any boundaries
inappropriately. The EDABI leadership team worked closely with product managers, data
scientists and data engineers to focus their efforts on how data could be used to benefit customers
and enhance their shopping experiences.
Desai acknowledged the importance of having a thoughtful and proactive policy on the
implications of these emerging technologies:
We care about the value and trust our guests put in us. We have designed specific
rules to ensure this trust (for example, excluding certain categories from
recommendations when not appropriate). We believe that our algorithms are in
service of the guests and we want to give them a measure of control so they can
customize their experiences.
In addition, all of the senior EDABI leadership team is aware of the biases that
could inadvertently creep into our algorithms. We consciously take steps to avoid
these biases—for example, we force the algorithms to index higher on variety
versus past behaviors.
Even if particular opportunities might make sense from a legal or technological point of view,
how EDABI and Target managed the overall implications of their recommendations was a key
point for the organization to address going forward.
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
EDABI leadership felt pleased with what the team has accomplished over the previous several
years. Data had helped fundamentally transform all aspects of Target’s business, and the
company continued to invest heavily in building a technically advanced organization that might
one day rival the traditional technology companies found in Silicon Valley and other parts of the
world.
But questions remained. First, in what other areas could EDABI use machine learning, and how
could the team make it both nuanced and also trusted for customers? Second, how could EDABI
make sure key decision-makers across Target could use data and machine learning to stay at the
cutting edge of the incredibly competitive online and offline retail industry? More colleagues in
other parts of the business needed to be trained in technology and data, and EDABI leaders
hoped the group’s capabilities could become an even larger part of the company’s everyday
operating rhythms. Third, the team pondered if the company was gathering the right data to
make decisions, and was Target investing in the correct areas to get information for customers
that would be both useful and helpful? Finally, the team pondered the importance of remaining
in front of key issues regarding privacy and trust with customers, especially given the
increasingly active regulatory landscape in the United States and around the world.
With these issues top of mind, the EDABI team wondered how best to address these challenges
in the next phase of the group’s development.
Exhibit 1 – Market Capitalization of Major U.S. Retailers
Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-former-lehman-brothers-trader-its-time-to-buy-123551522.html
(June 24, 2018).
Exhibit 2 – Target e-commerce Website Circa August 2011
Source: https://corporate.target.com/press/releases/2011/08/target-launches-redesigned-e-commerce-aug2011
(June 24, 2018).
Exhibit 3 – Sales by Channels from Target Operating Results, August 2018
Three Months Ended Six Months Ended

Contribution to Comparable Sales Change August 4, July 29, August 4, July 29,
(unaudited) 2018 2017 2018 2017
Stores channel comparable sales change 4.9% 0.2% 3.4% (1.0)%
Digital channel contribution to comparable sales change 1.5 1.1 1.3 0.9
Total comparable sales change 6.5% 1.3% 4.8% —%
Note: Amounts may not foot due to rounding.
Three Months Ended Six Months Ended

July 29, July 29,
Sales by Channel August 4, 2017 August 4, 2017
(unaudited) 2018 As Adjusted (a) 2018 As Adjusted (a)
Stores 94.4% 95.8% 94.6% 95.8%
Digital 5.6 4.2 5.4 4.2
Total 100% 100% 100% 100%
Source: Target press release, August 22, 2018,

https://corporate.target.com/_media/TargetCorp/Press/Multimedia/2018/08/Q2%20Earnings/Target-Reports-
Second-Quarter-2018-Earnings_1.pdf (October 2, 2018).
Exhibit 4 – Target Organization Chart
CEO
CMO CIO/CDO COO
Product
CDAO
Management
Business Business
Data Data
Intelligence Intelligence
Governance Science
Engineering & Analysis
Source: Target
Exhibit 5 – Target EDABI and Product Management Leadership
Paritosh Desai
Paritosh Desai is the Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Target. He previously served as a
Senior Director of Data Science at Gap Inc. Prior to Gap, he held senior roles at an IBM-owned
retail analytics firm, DemandTec. Desai holds a PhD in Operations Research from Stanford
University.
Tim Sears
Tim Sears is the Vice President of Data Science and Engineering for Target. Prior to joining the
company in March 2015, he founded the crowd-sourcing startup Pingwell. Before Pingwell Sears
founded Biogreen Oil, a sustainability company that raised over $150 million in funding.
Sears also worked at Morgan Stanley as an Executive Director. He received a PhD in Machine
Learning from the Australian National University and also graduated with honors from the
University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Sciences in Economics. In addition, he holds a Master
of Science in Economics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Samir Shah
Samir Shah is Senior Director of Data Engineering at Target. Shah joined the company in 2014
after serving for 10 years at DemandTec, a retail analytics arm of IBM. Shah holds a Bachelor of
Science in Electrical Engineering from Mumbai University.
Ramasubbu Venkatesh
Ramasubbu “Venky” Venkatesh is Senior Director of Data Science and Personalization. He has
over two decades of experience developing deep mathematical models and applying machine
learning techniques to problems across industries. Venkatesh was previously Senior Algorithms
Developer at Netflix and Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Verizon Labs. Venkatesh
has a PhD in Nuclear Engineering (Computational Physics) from Texas A&M University.
Meghna Sinha
Meghna Sinha is Vice President of Testing and Measurement and leads enterprise-wide testing
and measurement capabilities via data systems, data science applications, artificial intelligence
applications and automation innovations. Sinha joined Target in 2011 after serving four years as
Chief Analytical Officer at IRI. Sinha holds a Master’s degree in Quantitative Analysis from the
University of Cincinnati.
Aarthi Srinivasan
Aarthi Srinivasan is director of Product Management and Personalization at Target. She joined
the company in 2016 after serving as Principal Product Manager at Walmart Labs and as Vice-
President of Product Management at JP Morgan Chase. Srinivasan holds an MBA from the
Wharton School.
Source: Target
Exhibit 6 – Example of Personalization and Recommendation
Source: Target website (June 24, 2018)
Exhibit 7 – Personalization Types
Informative Predictive Guest-Curated

Personalization Personalization Personalization
Source: Target
Exhibit 8 – Evolution of the Personalization Engine
2015 2016 2017

Web and mobile personalization Personalization in Cartwheel app Real-time personalization
Source: Target
Exhibit 9 – Cartwheel
Source: https://corporate.target.com/article/2016/06/cartwheel-update (June 24, 2018).

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For the exclusive use of J. Lee, 2019.

TARGET: CREATING A DATA-DRIVEN PRODUCT

THE RETAIL INDUSTRY IN THE UNITED STATES

TARGET – A BRICK AND MORTAR DISCOUNT RETAILER

Becoming Digital – First Steps

 Personalized shopping: The company’s website offered customers product

The company had a tremendous opportunity to gather data to improve decision

Growing a Technical Culture Inside of a Retail Company

Consolidating and Growing EDABI

 Supply chain – EDABI began to engage on stock and inventory management

INTEGRATION WITH PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Collaboration Between Product Managers and the Data Team

We are trying to do data science with an actual product management mindset so

Early Product Management/EDABI Collaboration: Cartwheel

THE NEXT PHASE OF EDABI – BEYOND 2018

Educating the Enterprise on Advanced Data Science Capabilities

Branding and Business Rules

Machine learning applications could lead to some unintended consequences if not

WHERE TO FROM HERE?

Exhibit 1 – Market Capitalization of Major U.S. Retailers

Exhibit 2 – Target e-commerce Website Circa August 2011

Exhibit 3 – Sales by Channels from Target Operating Results, August 2018

Three Months Ended Six Months Ended

Three Months Ended Six Months Ended

Source: Target press release, August 22, 2018,

Exhibit 4 – Target Organization Chart

CMO CIO/CDO COO

Exhibit 5 – Target EDABI and Product Management Leadership

Exhibit 6 – Example of Personalization and Recommendation

Source: Target website (June 24, 2018)

Exhibit 7 – Personalization Types

Informative Predictive Guest-Curated

Exhibit 8 – Evolution of the Personalization Engine

2015 2016 2017

Source: https://corporate.target.com/article/2016/06/cartwheel-update (June 24, 2018).

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