53. What Successful E-Com Innovation Looks Like with Sneha Narahalli, VP Head of Product at Sephora

Sneha Narahalli, VP Head of Product at Sephora, joins E-Commerce with Coffee?! host Nate Svoboda to talk about what successful technology transformations look like. Sneha artfully outlines answers to each question that are each mini-systems in and of themselves. How does a brand avoid acquiring too much overlapping technology? She has a system for that. What does personalization in e-commerce require? She has a system for that, too.

Sneha’s expertise covers the biggest pain points that brands look to technology to solve: customer acquisition and client experience. She’s also extraordinarily insightful in how to apply technology to business goals in a meaningful way. Listen to the full interview to hear everything she has to say!

What to listen for:

• As usual, Nate opens with a question about coffee. To his delight, it turns out that Sneha’s mother grows coffee in the richest coffee region of India, and Sneha gets ground coffee from her mom exclusively!

• Sneha then walks us through her professional trajectory. She started working for the technology department of Sears, and then later moved to Walmart and Walmart Labs. After that, she moved to Sephora. Her focus has always been on the customer experience, including end customers and internal teams. Listen to the full episode to hear her describe how the brands have differed. “As I continue to grow,” she comments, “I've come to understand how important the leadership team is...much more important than the role itself.”

• When asked what motivates her, Sneha answers, “ambiguity!” Any process (or lack of process) inside of a team or organization where steps are not laid out is her cup of tea (or coffee, as it were). She’s a clean-up artist with no shortage of curiosity.

• As the interview turns to tech trends, Sneha notes how companies today have learned to “reinvent themselves as tech companies” instead of business-focused companies. “The importance of technology driving business strategy,” she explains, “is no longer about ‘here's our business goal, let's see whether technology can achieve it or not.’” Instead, technology can drive business goals in some areas—and in all others, it's about the partnership between technology and business goals. Listen to the full interview to hear Sneha expand on this compelling concept.

• Sustainability in tech is a conversation you’ll be glad Nate had with Sneha. Questions came up like, “what needs to be true of a tech solution for it to be useful today and in 10 years?” Sneha’s expertise shines brilliantly as she breaks her answer down into bite-size pieces. She starts, “a technology solution needs a strong foundation that’s able to adapt to change.” Solutions designed for customer problems, she adds, don’t usually do that. Tech creators instead need to look at the current use case that they’re solving and then ask what use cases are likely in the near and distant future. Listen to the full interview to hear what that looks like.

• When asked about personalization in the consumer experience, Sneha puts her “consumer” hat on and muses, “you need to know what I’m doing… and if I’m changing, adapt to the way that I’m changing and make my life easier. And, if possible, delight me.” Removing friction is the key. Sneha talks about the essential systems that brands need to support personalization, too. Listen to the full interview to hear what she says.

• As a closing thought, Nate asks Sneha about being a woman in the tech world, which is still largely dominated by men. She advises people to think of it this way: “it’s my job to tell you [the employer, the supervisor, etc.] ‘I’m OK with this’ or ‘I’m not OK with this.’” Businesses also need to create environments that allow people to “show up as their true, authentic selves,” she says, by tolerating no biases. Listen to her final thoughts on the episode.