After a year in which Nordstrom navigated layoffs, departures and revamped strategies related to its digital efforts, the Seattle-based retailer announced Wednesday that it would head into 2017 without its chief technology officer.
Kumar Srinivasan, who has been with the company for less than a year, is leaving the company as CTO, effective Friday, to return to India later this month. The news was shared in an internal email from Dan Little, Nordstrom’s chief information officer.
Little credited Srinivasan with leading “a number of successful efforts to identify opportunities to reduce complexity while optimizing engineering and software productivity.”
The company said that with Srinivasan’s departure it will be taking some time to evaluate the long-term leadership structure of its technology team and will continue to actively search to fill several key VP roles in technology.
Last May, Courtney Kissler, vice president of digital and store technologies, was among three digital leaders who announced plans to leave the company. The news came after Nordstrom cut approximately 120 jobs from its technology team in March and then subsequently announced plans to cut as many as 400 additional jobs across the company in April.
GeekWire reported that the company had been investing heavily in technology, spending $300 million annually in an effort to compete more effectively with Amazon and others, but the investments hadn’t been paying off as much as the company hoped.
But new digital initiatives continued to roll out later into the year as Nordstrom unveiled its “Reserve & Try In Store” feature, for instance, to better bridge the divide between traditional in-store shoppers and an increasingly digital-minded audience.
