A Walmart deep dive
Tyler Smith ’24 MBA, MS is in the midst of a multi-year tour of the vast Walmart empire — a journey he never imagined he would take. Smith is a member of the retail company’s Merchandising Leadership Development Program, which gives its participants a view into the full breadth of the company’s global footprint.
The goal is to develop future Walmart leaders with a clear understanding of what fuels the engine of the world’s largest retailer and employer. As Tyler makes his way through the program, he continues to rely on lessons he learned in Northwestern’s MMM Program: MBA + MS Design Innovation — a dual-degree designed for cross-functional leaders who build at the nexus of business strategy, human-centered design and technology application.
A change in career trajectory
Smith had spent five years as an engineer with medical technology company Baxter International when he started the MMM Program in 2022. He had planned to stay in healthcare, but a professor in the program encouraged him to explore other industries while still in school. “You’re not risking anything," Smith remembered the professor saying. "If you don’t like it, you can always go back."
Pursuing that advice led Smith to a merchandising operations internship at Walmart, a company with more than 2 million employees worldwide — 1.6 million in the United States alone — and nearly 11,000 locations in 19 countries. “I never thought my career would take me to Walmart,” Smith said, “but I found this, and I’m glad I did.”
His task then was to help the business adapt to ease customers’ pain points amid high inflation. To do that, he introduced colleagues to a human-centered and desirability led framework he learned in one of the MMM Program’s featured classes: Research-Design-Build. “I was the only intern to do that, so they could have thought I was crazy,” he said. “They didn’t, and the exposure was great.”
That exposure led to Smith’s current position. Participants in the Merchandising Leadership Development Program rotate among various roles and areas in the company throughout the five years to develop general managerial expertise. In his first year, Smith served as a planner in the camping business, a role he described as a mini chief financial officer. This year, he is working as a replenishment manager with the automotive team, applying AI to solve technical and strategic problems to ensure Walmart’s products are in the right place at the right time.
“I think it's exciting because I get to focus not just on one facet of the business but on multiple areas,” he said. “It's a way to apply different skills that I learned at Northwestern and in MMM and bring them to life.” At Walmart, Smith sees the same intense focus on the customer preached throughout the MMM program.
“I want to negotiate a better cost, not for myself, but so I can pass it along to the customer, so they can afford more groceries and live better lives,” he said. “It’s something that I connected to and something that drives me.”
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Northwestern’s MMM Program is a fully integrated dual degree between the Kellogg School of Management and the Segal Design Institute at the McCormick School of Engineering. Students earn both an MBA and a Master of Science in Design Innovation.