THE BEST LEADERS ARE CONSTANT LEARNERS

Heather Mickman is a performance-driven technology executive and a recognized leader in the Agile, DevOps community. She has a proven ability to successfully envision, lead and implement transformative technology strategies across large organizations. Heather is an energetic leader with a proven track record in retaining and recruiting top engineering talent and effectively building partnerships across large, matrixed enterprises.

Throughout her career, Heather has continuously embraced hard technology challenges from consulting large Fortune 50 companies on Supply Chain approach, implementing warehouse automation technologies, running large Ops & Support organizations, and establishing enterprise security approaches. She has a passion for technology, building high performing teams, driving a culture of innovation, and having fun along the way.

Prior to Gap she worked in two large organizations: Target and UnitedHealth Group. At Target, she led many of the modernization efforts in IT, including the initial API strategy and delivery and cloud migration. At UnitedHealth Group, she says, “I was excited to take the learnings from retail and apply it to healthcare problems.”

It’s her love of retail that brought her to Gap where she joined at SVP Engineering + Architecture in 2021 and later stepped up to be the Chief Information Officer. As CIO she is responsible for the technology that powers everything for Gap Inc: stores, ecommerce, supply chain, product development, distribution centers, enterprise and employee technologies, and more. Gap Inc. operates more than 3,000 stores and an end-to-end supply chain network from sourcing to fulfillment. And it has the second-largest apparel ecommerce site. Powering the underlying technology to run the operations at this scale is quite a challenge. It’s being continuously challenged that excites Heather. “That way, I can continuously learn,” she says and loves to be surrounded by interesting, hard-working, intelligent people.

Technology is changing retail in ways not imagined before. There are plenty of opportunities. For all the aspiring retail technology leaders, here’s what Heather would like to advice, “We need to continuously push ourselves and raise the bar with what we’re doing. “Do it! Be a continuous learner and find your voice. Your opinions and ideas are important. Build the courage to speak up and show up, and try to do it in a way that’s authentic to yourself. You’re the only one who’s going to watch out for your career, no one else is. It’s your own career and it’s up to you to make it what you want it to be.”

Heather Mickman

Chief Information Office, Gap