My honest review of WooliesX
After 3+ years of working at WooliesX and only leaving earlier this year, I thought I’d share my honest opinions of my experiences for anyone looking at potential roles there.
(side note: ‘WooliesX’ no longer exists as an entity as of earlier this year, leadership absorbed it into the broader company to better serve “group capability” and is now called WDigital)
Pros: - Flexibility and ability to work fully remote. - Great people at an individual contributor level with a drive to solve customer problems. - Decent work life balance
Cons: - Company was once startup style culture with the ability to move rapidly and take risks, this is regressing now with Woolies being further integrated into the Group, as a traditional retail operation masquerading as tech.
The definition of agile hell: Some say Telstra is bad but I have no doubt it is worse here. So many layers of scrum masters and “delivery leads” with a quarterly delivery cycle that is derailed every time with senior leadership priorities or other squad’s dependencies that weren’t raised in planning due to the complexity/scale of every tribe.
Siloed teams across different tribes with different objectives doing overlapping work in the same product, with a lack of product-wide strategy. Different tribes and business units actively try to outcompete each other on initiatives and real estate within the product, rather than joining forces and collaborating for the benefit of a better product.
Non competitive salaries, with it being extremely difficult to increase your salary within the pay band beyond the sub-CP increases stipulated by management - pay rise this year was 3%.
Convoluted bonus structure, with tech teams being scored broad metrics such as in-store safety. Bonuses for digital teams were massively impacted by warehouse worker deaths while the board voted to abstain leadership from these reductions (as seen in the Annual Report).
Little benefits compared to big tech e.g Only 5% always on discount.
Extremely difficult to be promoted without having to move teams to a vacancy at a higher level (which involves an internal application/interview process).
- There is little trust in outputs or knowledge base of teams who engage with customers week in, week out - leadership “know best” what customers want.
- Initiatives with prescribed leadership solutions are handed to squads, with no opportunity for exploration of customer problems or exploring wider solutions. Additionally, there is little interest at a leadership level in the outputs of teams who engage with users and what these insights might tell us are the most attractive or beneficial to users.
Teams then build these prescribed solutions as "MVP" with no plans or structure to revisit solutions later to improve upon MVP or even a process of post launch continual monitoring or success metric setting which would see the solution revisited if it isn't adopted by users.