Oliver Bradley is Global eCommerce Experience Design Director at Unilever, leading Experience Design in Unilever’s global eCommerce team which is about partnering with eCommerce retailers across the globe to deliver better experiences for shoppers online.

Oli partnered with Cambridge University to create mobile ready hero images proven to deliver stronger conversion than standard images regardless of screen-size. Oli also measures the quality of Unilever’s online brand experience across over 30 countries & 150 retailer websites to ensure Unilever is consistently delivering the best possible brand experience online. He’s a bit of a geek that admits to enjoying eye tracking, as well as video interviewing people on how to improve their experience online. 

He’s passionate about design & photography and can be found on twitter @eCommerceULVR. In his free time, Oli loves to get outdoors surfing, mountain biking with his wife & 13 yr old son. 

Why did you choose to pursue eCommerce in your career? It is my “sweet spot” as it combines a love of design, shopper insight, data and getting stuff done fast to test and learn what works. I love creating new stuff with a creative team of people passionate about this space and open to experimentation.

What is your biggest strength, and how have you used it for your success in eCommerce? I think its probably my energy and determination / persistence – I don’t give up easily.

What is the weirdest skill or talent to come in handy in your eCommerce experience? Video editing and also being pretty good at Photoshop – both help with design and visual storytelling and we need to be really persuasive particularly as visuals evoke emotion and engagement in a different way to text alone – and we need to be able to use both to “move people, and create a movement” – I think I managed to create a mobile ready hero image movement leveraging LinkedIn and it was driven by visuals.

How have you most successfully influenced change within your organization (or with your clients)? Probably using Design Thinking within my role, learning to slow down to take people in Unilever on the journey, don’t just assume they “get it” and will come with you – they won’t until they “see what you see” and self-realization of what I call provocative shopper insight is powerful.

What was your most “valuable” career failure, and why? Launching Lipton Ice Tea in the UK and learning British people really don’t like cold tea (I am a South African and its been very successful there). I learned to pivot and move on. If I hadn’t failed so spectacularly in that role it wouldn’t have prompted me to take a web design course, learn UX and move into eCommerce.

In the last five years, what new belief, behavior or habit has most improved your life? Journaling daily. As a leader your most important job is to keep your ego in check, people don’t relate to arrogance – they love humility and your team will love you if you embrace leading with humility. I often fail here but journaling helps…a lot. Albert Einstein said “When I swim in silence…the truth comes to me”. Journaling is about slowing myself down, its about the silence and stopping to break the “action addiction” which prevents you from really getting to the underlying issues at hand.

What are you learning right now? With tight resource it’s about helping people make choices – often they want everything but you have to show them the trade-offs, and with understanding (which takes time & patience) they make better choices.

What are the 1-3 songs that would make up your career soundtrack today?

• Nervous Energy by the Glades: As I’m ADHD and love the crazy pace of eCommerce, but have to slow myself down to reflect and think a lot more.
• Giant Killer by LZ7: I like to think of my work on mobile ready hero images as taking on the giants and showing that inclusive design (making life better for people who don’t have a PC or have poor eyesight) is important work in line with my christian faith.
• I Wont Let You Go by Switchfoot and Lauren Diagle: it has an amazing line – “pain gives birth to the promise ahead” – everything worthwhile is really tough – takes hard work, persistence is genius in my home – to get to the next level you have to get through the messy middle and keep going through the pain.

What are the 1-3 books you’ve gifted the most or that have greatly influenced your life, and why?

• Book of Proverbs from the Bible: see my answer to “What is the last thing you bought online, and why?” below.
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown: so good – only a few things really matter, and the truth that everything is a trade-off. The other one
• Radical Candor by Kim Scott: being fearless about feedback and giving really detailed specific direct feedback has transformed our Unilever eCommerce team – it’s a value we live out and it’s raised our game immeasurably.

If you could have a gigantic billboard for the world to see with anything on it, what would it say, and why? Persistence is genius. 

What are the worst recommendations or advice you have heard related to eCommerce? “we don’t care about mobile because conversion on mobile is worse than desktop”

The truth is that shopper experience on mobile was (and is some cases) miserable so no wonder conversion was poor. The other truth is mobile is a shop in people’s pockets – it’s a shopping assistant so the pioneers who can make the mobile experience marvelous rather than ignore the issue will get the reward of superior conversion from the internet’s most popular device.

What advice would you give to a future leader of change about to enter business, or specifically the eCommerce field? If I had to pick one thing I’d say never stop learning, push yourself to learn and embrace being “comfortable with being uncomfortable”. We should always feel like we are needing to reskill & learn something new. 

What specific, industry-related change do you believe will happen that few others seem to see? I started work on mobile ready hero images back in 2012 as I could see it would dominate eCom back then, was pleased to be proven right as this happened into 2018, and pleased with the amazing levels of adoption of our work which we open-sourced so it could become a GS1 industry standard. On what’s next for eCommerce everyone thought voice would be hugely disruptive and so far it’s hardly made any noticeable change. If I had to pick one big thing to disrupt eCommerce, I’d not pick Voice, I’d pick AI and automation of tasks at scale. 

What is the last thing you bought online, and why? I bought a journal. Yes… an “analog write in it long hand” journal. It was a journal that walks through the book of Proverbs and allows you to reflect on how the wisdom of Proverbs applies to leading at work and you family. Been honestly the best purchase I’ve made in 2020. I’m using it every day – I journal using DayOne an app on my smartphone but there’s nothing quite like pen and paper to make sense of what’s going on inside you. Paper has taken things to a new level.

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First Movers is a change leader interview series featuring select industry pioneers who are boldly driving the evolution of digital commerce, the consumer and everything in between.