In retail, we all talk about the importance of the omnichannel customer experience. But to deliver it on the frontend you also need an omnichannel operational experience on the backend. Or as Colin Yankee of Tractor Supply Company calls it, “Unified Commerce”.

Combining physical and digital, unifying information for stores and connecting the organization together are core foundations of successful retail today.

“We think about our team members as our customers as well”, Stefanie Kruse Curly of Walgreens explains.

Innovators are taking the lessons we’ve learned from customer experience - the need to be personalized, frictionless, seamless - and applying them to manager and employee experience to stop teams falling over.

“Change is here to stay, the old model of ‘set it and forget it’ doesn’t exist anymore”, as Allison Peterson of Best Buy says.

With a rapidly changing environment and customer, ways we were managing in the past aren’t suitable for the present and future. All our OmniStars are aggressively investing in new technologies that offer the promise of simplifying and connecting the business to its employees.

“The field will understand the customer’s problems far better as they interact with them far more often”, shares Raghu Mahadevan, Chief Digital Officer at 7-Eleven.

Data is the plural of anecdote, and making sure you’re getting quantitative as well as qualitative insight from the field is essential. Building proper feedback processes enables understanding of what’s working at the field level, and also brings in diverse perspectives that are essential for innovation.

You don’t have to be as singular as Amazon’s single-threaded projects, like Dilip Kumar talks about.

But all OmniStars follow a simple Agile model, learned from the software world - Prioritize. Act. Measure. Such a philosophy is critical for iterating rapidly to success and fostering an Agile mindset.