Updating Walmart's Search Algorithm

If you searched 'frozen dress' on Walmart.com, you might get a shoe, a t-shirt, or nothing at all. One in four searches on the site was returning rogue products or no results, eroding trust with both customers and suppliers. The search team had diagnosed the issue and built a fix that required thousands of merchandisers to manually review and rework their product queries, on top of their existing daily workload. We recognized this as an incredibly time-consuming project on top of keeping the lights on. The communications strategy had to be explicit with the why behind the what, and encourage teams to move quickly.

The biggest risk was inertia. While the merchandisers understood the problem once they saw it, it was harder to give them the time they needed to readjust priorities and ensure that individual effort would add up to something meaningful. I built the campaign around three things: transparency about the problem and the stakes, manager enablement so leaders could make the work a real priority, and a gamified competition that made individual effort visible and rewarded. I also brought in a member of the search team who was a former merchandiser to represent the initiative. He spoke their language and answered questions from a place of genuine credibility.

The campaign ran across three months and touched every channel: targeted email, a weekly newsletter, in-person QA sessions, manager briefings, and a department-level competition tracking which teams were making the most progress on their query reviews. Every piece of communication led with the same thing: the problem, the solution, and the outcome we were working toward. KPIs were shared openly so merchandisers could see the progress they were part of. Departments competed on a visible leaderboard and winners got public recognition.

I'd build in a measurement layer to track behavior change following the campaign. Having proof points that the new querying behavior stuck would have made the case for future campaigns much stronger.

People need clarity, time, and a reason to change how they work. Communications that treat behavior change as the real challenge are the ones that actually move things.