2023 Women of Excellence, Technology

Katherine Magann

Director, Business Delivery Planning
Vestcom

Katherine Magann owns business delivery planning for Vestcom’s IT department, managing its Analyst and Test Engineer teams. She has collaborated to onboard some of the largest and most complex customer data solutions in the company’s history and, more recently, was pivotal in executing a new business pilot for a large-scale national retailer account.

She led the cross-functional team to coordinate development efforts amid on-going discovery, and from pilot to rollout oversaw 140 development enhancements, ensuring the team successfully completed them on schedule. She also plays a critical role in internal updates, and has been instrumental in the successful migration from Workfront to DevOps and adaptation to the Agile methodology across some of the company’s teams, with others still in progress.

During her tenure, she has led customer data solutions that have doubled the number of stores supported to 60,000 sustained store deliveries, week over week, while achieving more than 98% on-time delivery for customers, year over year. She has also been instrumental in the delivery of new business projects for customer-specific software development platforms.

Magann has been at Vestcom since 2018 and has more than 20 years of experience in retail strategy, category management, product management and IT projects. In 2014, she was named a Progressive Grocer Top Women in Grocery winner. She serves as co-chair of Vestcom Women United ERG, committed to cultivating an inclusive environment that supports the women of Vestcom in achieving their personal and professional goals through connection, collaboration and education.

Sanela Odzic

Global Director, Digital Commerce Technologies
Mars

Sanela Odzic was a key technology lead in reimagining the M&M’s digital experience, most notably by transforming the brand’s website from a purely transactional e-commerce experience hosted on an outdated external technology platform to an affordable, scalable, global direct-to-consumer technology platform for all of Mars’ DTC brands.

The new platform went live across 14 countries in March 2023 with record results. The launch featured a CPG industry-first headless platform with a 100% composable microservices architecture. Today, the M&M’s website is optimized for mobile, introduces several new e-commerce features, and showcases the new identity and purpose of the M&M’s brand.

Odzic introduced the platform and product, letting brands focus on their key differentiating traits (i.e., the possibility to configure an M&Ms gift on MMs.com, including colors, images and packaging). It offers a tailored user experience and, from the onset, helped technical and non-technical stakeholders understand the more sophisticated engineering practices that Mars and its partners can adopt. The platform team continues to add new DTC capabilities to drive growth. 

Since the launch, performance results of the site versus last year include a 134% increase in traffic, average order volume up 9%, a 22% increase in revenue and an increase in site performance that is exceeding targets on both desktop and mobile.

Odzic has been on the Mars team since 2020. Her 25-plus-year career includes retail and CPG, offline and online, business and tech.

Adenike Olaleye

Senior Manager of E-Commerce Merchandising
Ahold Delhaize – Giant Food

One of Giant Food’s key brand differentiators and growth drivers is meal solutions. Adenike Olaleye has embraced the challenge of making its e-commerce channel a stronger meal solution experience as the senior manager of e-commerce merchandising. She created new ways to discover and engage with the retailer’s meal assortment by developing a dedicated virtual aisle, repurposing existing technology to offer a one-click recipe purchase experience, and organizing content under new sections by prep speed and meal type.

Olaleye formed new partnerships with local vendors to bring additional sandwiches, salads, wing trays and more to the assortment offering. Her focus on improving all aspects of Giant Food’s meals operation also led to her strengthening the technology in its e-commerce warehouses, including a project to link deli and bakery scales to the same technology platform as its brick-and-mortar stores in order to improve item and price accuracy while reducing maintenance time. She has worked to present mouth-watering images and content to customers by organizing “storm-the-store” sessions with Giant’s digital image technology partner, and has driven improvement in other key metrics, like profit margin and shrink from the work. The renewed experience continues to encourage new selling ideas.

Olaleye’s initiatives have led to significant growth online, with both customer impressions and sales up more than 30% during key periods.

Noa Reikhav

Vice President of Product
Skai

Noa Reikhav has been instrumental in leading the charge in developing Skai’s award-winning retail media technology solutions since she became vice president of product in October 2021. She has more than doubled the size of the business and advanced the ability for retail media advertisers to overcome their biggest challenges and scale their campaigns.

Reikhav’s background in communication, brain science and psychology has helped her understand both the consumer mindset and how marketers work in order to invent technology that is both highly effective and efficient in reaching new consumers. With no formal training in coding or engineering, she is a self-made product expert.

Under her leadership, Skai’s retail media business has grown by more than 100% over the past two years, she secured Amazon Ads Advanced Partner status, and has pioneered innovative features that help retail media advertisers make better decisions, drive performance and stay in line with industry changes.

Two examples of her work include Skai’s Competitive Insights features that give customers the ability to analyze competitors’ share of voice as well as their own, right down to the brand, keyword and product level; and Search Term Analysis, which helps clients reduce unnecessary spend by 40% in the first month on average.

Reikhav has spent more than seven years with the company, shaping its product roadmap and leading more than 100 indirect reports.

Jacqueline Rice

Director, Data Science & Analytics
Dollar General

Dollar General built its retail media network from the ground up. As director of data science and analytics, Jacqueline Rice has worked to build an analytics data layer, leaning heavily into the design of the data model, including table structure and grain, naming conventions, and authoring code logic for complex derivations for the past two years.

She collaborated with the retailer’s data engineering team to understand complex coupon data and develop code logic to determine offer type for the first time in Dollar General’s history, which now helps inform not only analytics, but also auditing needs. She also explores its first-party identity resolution partner data, uncovering and correcting data issues across key tables as well as documenting explanations for others to reference.

Rice led the coordination with Databricks and Dollar General IT (DGIT) to provide functionality that is crucial to the data science team. She worked with management consultants and Dollar General’s data architect to establish recommendations and guidance that will set technology foundations to enable data science work, such as access to Gitlab code management, differentiated data environments and the development of production data pipelines.

She has helped upskill six new team members on the decision science team, documenting models, processes and “how to” steps for new hires and business partners to reference as needed, and managed the customer-derived attributes process alongside the Dollar General IT team.