CASE: Walgreens Boots Alliance
Senior Director, Platform Product Engineering
The Situation
We have a well-established relationship with Walgreens Boots Alliance, so we were ready to take on the challenge to recruit a Senior Director of Product Engineering for the Healthcare & Pharmacy Platform of the Walgreens business unit.
To compete in the current digital pharmacy landscape, Walgreens wanted to provide customers with a more seamless experience and greater accessibility to healthcare products and services. The overarching aim was the augmentation of digital and the knowledge that sat within the organisation.
From a product engineering perspective, the transformation had already begun, and some assets had been built. The objective now was to drive forward, leveraging these assets as the platform for future builds. To help achieve this vision, the business were looking to bring in an engineering leader at the Senior Director level.
The Opportunity
The role holder would be responsible for leading the planning and engineering of the pharmacy and healthcare product portfolio, partnering with product management and other enabling functions to deliver state of the art solutions, technologies and transformational business strategies. They would also be tasked with appointing leaders to spearhead engineering functions underneath them.
Overall, they would be an engineer at heart; an individual who began as an engineer and worked their way up to the Senior Director level. However, they would also be able to translate complex strategies and ideas into language senior management could relate to and be a key influencer on technical decisions that affected the business on a long-term basis.
Finally, the successful candidate would also be flexible, and recognise that there were a lot of internal and external factors over which they had no control. The individual would need to be skilled at dealing with unexpected circumstances and adapt accordingly.
What made this interesting?
We were running this search in parallel with one for a Senior Director, Solution Delivery in the same unit of the business. Director-level employees were already in place for both roles, but more oversight was needed so that the Software Technology Executive, our main client for the search, could spend more time with business stakeholders.
Moreover, it was a pleasure to work with one of the most business-critical technology divisions within Walgreens. The Pharmacy and Healthcare technology platform was essential to the business’ key operations, with responsibility for: dispensing pharmacy products, coordinating the pharmacy supply chain and communications, and overseeing pharmacy advisory services.
What made this challenging?
A clear challenge was conducting two projects in tandem for Walgreens and having to address two needs of the business. We had more candidates, interviews and stakeholders to deal with and both projects were at the exact same stages as each other throughout.
Moreover, the size and complexity of the business and the significance of these new roles in their digital transformation made it vital that we found exceptional candidates that we could trust to deliver. In many organisations, leaders with the level of responsibility that this role required (in terms of team size, budgets and scale of operations) sat at the VP level, increasing the challenge of finding a suitable leader at the Senior Director level.
The Digital Board Process
Due to our well-established working relationship with Walgreens, we already had contextual information on the structure, culture and complexity at the organisation, but we had never worked directly with our main contact, the Software Technology Executive, before. We therefore had to get to know his process and hopes for the engineering role. As always, we took our time with stakeholders to fully understand the functions for this role and got up to speed with the latest developments of their digital transformation.
Following these calls, we briefed our researchers. Our main criteria for this search were:
A product engineering thought leader and evangelist
Someone with the ability to articulate, influence, lead, motivate and manage
A Consumer healthcare specialist with deep experience in the healthcare and/or retail industries to grasp the issues Walgreens were facing
Using this as a base, our research began and we produced a comprehensive list of potential candidates. We then set up multiple introductory calls with our researcher who screened potential candidates to assess their interest in the role, their fit to brief, their past achievements and their cultural alignment.
After this, we conducted formal interviews with a selection of these candidates meeting our CEO, Bryan MacDonald. Five were recommended for our final shortlist.
Throughout the process, our research team continued to identify new candidates, in case anything went wrong with our shortlist
Success Story
The successful candidate stood out from the very first interview. They had incredible technical knowledge and fit the brief exceptionally well.
The candidate had a wealth of experience in both retail and healthcare and had clear influencing skills. They were highly likeable with a formal approach to gaining stakeholder trust and they had a collaborative leadership style, which fit the dynamic and innovative culture at Walgreens. They were also incredibly interested in the opportunity and wanted to work in an industry that would make a positive difference in people’s lives.
Another success of the search was that one of our other shortlisted candidates was subsequently offered another role in the organisation. After meeting a number of stakeholders, the candidate felt that they were slightly too senior for the role, but role Walgreens were very impressed with them and were keen to bring them in, so a vacant VP position was offered and accepted.