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WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — As Hy-Vee’s senior vice president of IT strategy and planning, Jennifer Lambert plays a key role in helping the business leaders connect with technology partners to advance their business objectives.
“Part of my responsibility is understanding the business, and then providing insight into how technology can help achieve the goals that the business is aiming for,” says Lambert. “The second part is delivering on that by ensuring we are using our resources efficiently and managing things like budgets to make sure we accomplish our goals.”
Lambert brings more than 20 years of experience in software development, project management and product management, primarily in health care.
“Although I started my career as a software engineer, I quickly realized that I prefer solving problems and designing solutions more than I like coding,” says Lambert. “I’ve spent a good portion of my career in health care. Now that I’m at Hy-Vee, I’m bringing that experience to health care in a different light.”
Jennifer Lambert
Early in her career, Lambert helped design an online booking and referral system for the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, an experience that opened her eyes to the benefits of a system that encourages a proactive approach to health. Further experience with global health care technology company Cerner Corp. prepared Lambert to play a key role in the ongoing expansion of Hy-Vee’s health and wellness services.
“It’s been fun to move into retail but also stay in health,” says Lambert. “I never envisioned myself in retail, but have enjoyed learning the fast-paced, quick to move, very market-influenced sort of business, and applying the same skills that I applied to health care and pharmaceuticals from a standpoint of, ‘How do you understand the problem, how do you think about solving it with technology?’ and then making it real and usable.”
Since joining Hy-Vee in 2022, Lambert has helped strengthen Hy-Vee’s processes surrounding road map planning, operational execution and product management in IT. This has led to significant improvement in Hy-Vee’s ability to define product strategies and features quickly and effectively, leading to faster execution
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Most recently, Lambert spearheaded the rollout of Hy-Vee’s updated loyalty program, Hy-Vee Perks, from the technology side. Lambert and her team developed a digital infrastructure that would provide Perks members with the ability to get special Perks pricing on hundreds of items, in-store and online, as well as other personalized offers. Lambert helped in the development of the workflow design, ensuring the sign-up process was seamless for customers.
