Optimizing the Online Shopping Experience

Consumers know Walmart as a retailing giant that has changed the face of retail in communities across America. But with a data store containing billions of queries and items, it’s also a laboratory for the company’s data scientists and IT professionals who mine and manage it. “We have data scientists embedded in every single team within the company,” says Sonu Durgia, group product manager for search and discovery at Walmart Labs. “Every function at Walmart, from the quality of groceries to the supply chain, has data science embedded in it,” she noted during an interview recorded for the Women in Data Science podcast at Stanford University.

Because Walmart’s product catalog is immense, holding the attention of consumers and helping them find what they want to buy is a challenge. “We do not have your attention for the next several hours. We have to show you the right things very, very quickly. So it’s a ranking and relevance problem right there, even though it’s not coming from a query,” Durgia says. Explaining the insights of data scientists to the business and retail sides of Walmart, people who are not always conversant with technical issues is an important part of her job, she says. Her varied career path has provided her with the expertise to interact successfully with Walmart’s line of business executives. “My engineering degree gives me those tools to really understand the (algorithms) and work with these engineers and very savvy data scientists. My finance background gives me that bird’s eye view, understanding what the key things are here,” she says.

Because data science is still a male-dominated discipline, finding a role model can be difficult for women in the field. But technology, says Durgia, has enabled new ways for women to find role models. “Back in the day, you would just look at your peer group to find inspiration or even to solve some problems, ask about a concept you didn’t get in class. But now YouTube is your teacher. Everything is available,” she says.