Writing the recipe for a technical sales team

A Q&A with Amr Hiram, our new Director of Technical Delivery

Instacart’s consumer-facing app and shopper app makes grocery delivery accessible to over 80% of US households and 60% of Canadian households. The e-commerce and fulfillment apps most people see rely on a suite of B2B-focused retailer products — APIs and tools that make it easy for grocers to plug into the Instacart marketplace or build and maintain their own online storefronts. Now, with over 300 retailer partners and over 15,000 physical stores in the Instacart marketplace, we’re excited to welcome Amr Hiram to build out our brand new Technical Delivery team. This new engineering team charts the technical journey of our retail partners, handling everything from technical pre-sales, through implementation, technical account management, product launch, and follow-on support.

Amr’s a great addition to the team — he’s got a long history in retail technology. We sat down with Amr to talk about online grocery, engineering with empathy, and snacking!

You’ve been working in retail tech for a while — why the jump to Instacart?

I love working in retail tech. It has always been a huge part of my career — I started hacking away at Point of Sale software on terminals with 8K of RAM, then I went on to executing multi-vertical retail implementations worldwide at SAP. I led the team that has built multiple digital experiences at Loblaw Digital, laid the foundation at Unata in partnership with Longo’s/Grocery Gateway, and then went on to Tulip Retail where I worked to modernize the tools used by in-store sales associates.

Instacart is in a pretty unique position. One on hand, we’re evolving the way people shop for groceries — an experience that has seen relatively little change in decades. On the other hand, we’re helping retailers to join this evolution by transforming the way they service their own customers. I’m excited to be part of the journey to realize the full potential of this evolution.

What keeps bringing you back to the online grocery industry?

Grocery is fascinating because it’s so fundamental to everyone’s lives…everyone needs to eat, and yet there are so many factors that impact eating habits and purchasing decisions: convenience, budget, shopping experience, and brand loyalty. How do you build solutions that tailor to all permutations of these factors, and how do you do it at scale to support millions of purchases? Working on these challenges keeps me coming back!

What do you look for when hiring for a technical delivery team?

Empathy and execution. Technical delivery needs to forge relationships with retail partners and internal product/engineering teams alike. Technical Delivery helps us strike a balance between partner requirements and engineering deliverables, and empathy is critical in defining that balance. Deploying improvements in a retail environment requires detailed planning, impact assessment, and risk mitigation — these are vital aspects to flawless execution in a change-sensitive ecosystem.

You’re brand new — what’s the first project you’re going to work on once you’re settled?

The lifecycle of partnering with a retailer touches on all teams within technical delivery, and my goal is to deep dive into each stage of the cycle, followed by defining the engagement model between our retail partners and each team and stage. It’s important for our retail partners to become intimately familiar with how we operate and this enables us to establish a standard we can continuously improve upon.

What item is always in your cart? What do you make with it?

Sunflower seeds 🌻! They’re my guilty pleasure. I enjoy snacking on them when I’m winding down, or when relaxing outside during the not-frequent-enough hot days in my hometown just outside of Toronto.

Craving a new job? Want to work with Amr on our brand new Technical Delivery Team? Check out our current openings.

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Author

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.