Meet Christian, originally from Bad Hersfeld, a small town in central Germany. He leads the Transport and Customs team for Zalando’s Customer Fulfillment.
Read about his passion for bringing smart and empathetic people together to solve challenging problems, and how working in Logistics and enabling a great customer experience inspires him every day.
Which team do you lead at Zalando and what’s their role and responsibility?
I lead the Transport and Customs team which includes operational teams that are responsible for ensuring speedy delivery and refunds of customer orders and returns. The overall team also includes several product teams and an engineering team. Together, we’re working on carrier integrations, shipment tracking visibility, middle mile functionality, Zalando’s Plus Program, customs solutions, and more.
Tell us about what you enjoy most about your job.
I love the fact that I can use my breadth of experience in product management, operations management, and building teams and organizations. Because I’ve worked in different areas in logistics, I can be a supportive agent for my team by connecting groups within and outside of my team. That way, we can ensure our products and processes are built as efficiently as possible from end-to-end, working backwards from our customers.
It’s also hugely rewarding to be part of a team that’s learning and developing so fast and contributing to Zalando’s growth.
What is the most exciting project your team is currently working on?
We have plenty of exciting initiatives! One of our fastest-growing teams is discovering and building the special delivery and return options for Zalando’s Plus Program in order to delight our customers and support the growth of the program.
Another team is building the infrastructure to enable Zalando to use green delivery options more regularly, and there are teams that redesign fundamental platform software in the first, middle and last mile to enable improved visibility and scalability to better deliver on our promises.
Where do you see your team’s work having the greatest impact on Zalando?
By default, we’re building services to scale. Not only by volume, but also across teams. Our platforms and services will allow other internal (and in some cases external) teams to access and link to them in order to better utilize when we’ve solved a problem well. We’re just finishing work on a platform that enables Zalando’s partners to seamlessly integrate the generation of customer return labels, which has been a pronounced pain point for our partners.
Last year, we built delivery and returns services to enable the launch of Zalando’s Plus Program in France, the Netherlands, and Italy. That was a really exciting year (and the first year the new team was almost fully in place). We’ve achieved a lot, and we also made a lot of mistakes from which we have learned. To make 2022 even more successful, we’ve iterated our approach and analyzed areas in which we want to improve to build even better and more resilient and scalable products for our Plus customers.
In general, my overall team is not only building new services and platforms, but the team also runs the day-to-day operations of Zalando transportation and customs — we’re at the heart of enabling a great customer experience, and that’s really inspiring.
We’re building new delivery and return services, as well as improving existing services, to upgrade our customers’ experience and reduce defects. We want to excite our customers.
What makes Zalando Customer Fulfillment teams special?
Customer Fulfillment is where we make our customer promises happen. We connect inbound product flows with our warehouses, manage order assignment, optimize order allocation and fulfillment, to ensure that customer orders are shipped and delivered on time and without defect. It’s an area where we can make a positive impact — and there’s still plenty of opportunities for improvements.
Customer Fulfillment at Zalando is completely focused on our customers — they are at the heart of everything we do. The inventions and processes we build and the software we design are created to improve every aspect of our customers’ experience.
Tell us about a challenge your team faced and how you overcame it. And what is the biggest personal learning within your current role?
Zalando is growing extremely fast, which presents the challenge of ensuring we’re providing a great experience for new and existing team members. We’re constantly evolving the processes and forums of sharing information so we can learn from each other and help everyone contribute and grow professionally. It’s important that we quickly acknowledge when we make mistakes and that everyone knows that they should call out what needs to be improved. That way, everyone plays an important part in positively building our team.
Every day, I learn I don’t know enough. I’m often humbled by the excellent people I work with and enjoy being here; I’m learning to become a better listener, manager and person.
What is your passion? Has Zalando helped you pursue this?
My passion is bringing smart and empathetic people together to solve difficult problems. It inspires me to work closely with my team and to be supported by them. Creating something new means making mistakes is common but, thankfully, I work in a collaborative and supportive environment — which means the best idea always wins. By placing me between Product Management and Operations Management, I believe Zalando has put me where I can add the most value.
If you’re interested in our Customer Fulfillment teams, check out our open positions here.
