What's the Company Culture Like at Sysco LABS?

What does diversity mean to you in the context of an engineering team? How does having a diverse team enhance your overall collaboration, innovation or culture?

Diversity in engineering is about bringing together people who think differently, whether that difference comes from culture, background, experience level, or problem-solving style. 

On our team we’re spread across the U.S. and Sri Lanka, so we naturally see a range of perspectives and ways of working. A diverse team pushes us to collaborate more intentionally. 

I think about diversity in terms of roles and focus areas (on our team, we have iOS Android, QA and product input) where each discipline views the same problem from a different angle. 

We’ve built structures that help make the most of that mix of perspectives. We have tech design reviews that bring engineers together to share feedback and learn from each other. Dedicated guilds for iOS Android and QA allow our teams to connect across time zones to grow in their areas. Shared bug retros and a team newsletter celebrate wins and lessons across the org. 

We also leave space to reflect before big decisions, which helps everyone contribute their best thinking.

How does your team or company make diversity and inclusion an intentional part of hiring?

We’re intentional about building balanced teams in both skills and perspectives. Our goal is to have interview panels include engineers from both the United States and Sri Lanka so candidates can meet people from across the org. It gives them a sense of our culture and helps us evaluate more fairly since each interviewer looks for something different. 

We also look for traits that make people successful in a team environment like curiosity, empathy and strong communication. Working across those regions and time zones means we can’t rely on impromptu conversations. We have to slow down, communicate clearly and really listen. This has made our culture more thoughtful and inclusive. 

All these qualities are just as important as technical depth when you’re collaborating across skill levels and different parts of the world. 

Our goal is to create teams where everyone feels included and confident sharing their ideas from the start, as that’s when people do their best work.

What advice would you give to other teams looking to foster more diverse perspectives and ideas in their engineering org?

Diversity is really about valuing perspectives equally and creating an environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing ideas, even when they don’t perfectly align. 

Encourage collaboration across roles and regions and not just within them. Pair people from different backgrounds on projects, rotate who leads discussions and create opportunities for ideas to come from anywhere. 

Build diversity into how you plan, communicate and celebrate your team. When people see their input being heard, it reinforces a culture where new ideas can thrive. 

When distinct, unique viewpoints come together, the end result is always stronger.

Describe Sysco LABS’ culture in one word. What made you pick that word?

Dedication — inside and out. Sysco’s a pretty big company, and I know that when I first started I was a little worried that it’d be easy to get lost in the shuffle or have trouble connecting with others and have everything suddenly pass me by and fade into the background. 

What I found instead was, with that many people, there are so many passionate, friendly and incredible people eager to make connections and help you feel supported. Our on-the-ground colleagues are so dedicated to supporting one another, openly communicating with and celebrating each other, and collaborating across teams and with our greater technology organization to solve problems and innovate in brand new customer-focused ways. 

Our leaders, too, are dedicated to supporting us with the tools and direction we need to succeed. They’re also dedicated to finding new and meaningful routes of recognizing and valuing the contributions our people provide, whether through acknowledging and awarding excellent colleagues or boosting our colleague-driven culture committee and resource groups with some executive backup.

What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally? 

Something I’m proud to have been helping out with very recently — one that I think celebrates and illuminates the idea of dedication at Sysco — is an upcoming award ceremony for our technology organization, including Sysco LABS. From my unique point of view being behind the scenes, this long-term, cross-departmental collaborative effort isn’t just an affirming way of celebrating and gaining insight about colleagues across the company — it’s a great opportunity to flex and grow skills. From coordination efforts around driving nominations, pulling in volunteers and helping out with the myriad of moving parts of holding a corporate event to boosting the corporate communication effort of spreading the news and highlighting great coworkers, I’ve found a lot of the experience to be useful for both great corporate soft skills in communication, timing and collaboration as well as real, tangible lifts to some of my marketing abilities outside of my traditional writing and designing.

What’s it like to work on the design team at Sysco LABS?

What makes designing at Sysco interesting is the complexity of the ecosystem around us. Our customers interact with Sysco in so many different ways, from our e-commerce and mobile experiences to their sales consultant, deliveries, invoices and even the relationship they have with their driver. Behind those interactions is an enormous operational network that our digital experiences have to work within and connect to. There are digital experiences, physical operations and human relationships all working together to create one Sysco experience.

A big part of our job is orchestration. We think about how those touchpoints connect and how the experience stays coherent across platforms, channels, brands and users, especially at Sysco’s scale.

That means our designers have to think well beyond screens and features. We’re designing journeys, systems and relationships between experiences, and increasingly exploring how AI can connect them in ways that weren’t possible before.

How does your team bring different perspectives into the design process?

We’re very intentional about bringing the right perspectives into the work. Research sits within our team and is embedded throughout our process, helping us understand the people, behaviors and environments behind the experiences we design across the many industries Sysco serves.

Design, research and product work together to frame problems and regularly use workshops to bring in business stakeholders and engineering, challenge assumptions and build shared understanding before converging on a direction. Engineering helps us think beyond what works for one use case to what can scale across platforms, brands and experiences.

I think this becomes even more important as we integrate AI into the software development lifecycle. AI can dramatically accelerate how quickly teams move from an idea to something tangible, but speed makes shared context, intentional decision-making and cross-functional alignment more important, not less.

And collaboration doesn’t mean designing by committee. Design has a responsibility to synthesize those perspectives and protect the integrity of the experience. We’re deliberate about what we include, but equally critical about what we don’t.

What should candidates know about belonging, feedback or inclusion on your design team?

For me, belonging on a design team is less about everyone feeling the same and more about creating an environment where people can do their best thinking. We hire people with different experiences, strengths and perspectives because we expect those differences to improve the work.

That requires a culture where ideas can be challenged without people feeling personally challenged. Feedback on our team is direct, frequent and grounded in the problem we’re trying to solve. Seniority doesn’t make an idea right, and consensus isn’t always the goal. We want people to ask hard questions, surface risks, change their minds when the evidence changes and respectfully push back, including on me.

As a leader, my job is to create clarity around the standards and outcomes we expect, then give people room to exercise their own judgment. The strongest teams aren’t ones where everyone thinks alike. They’re ones where people trust each other enough to disagree, learn from one another and still move forward together.