Most retail technology hiring focuses on the shopper. Target's latest move is a reminder that the tools store teams use every shift can move the numbers just as much.
Retail technology conversations usually start with the customer: the app, the site, the personalization engine. Retail Dive's report on Target's upgraded store operations app starts somewhere else, with the people working the floor.
Target has refreshed myDay, the app its store employees use to run their shifts, as part of the broader turnaround under CEO Michael Fiddelke. The company built the changes around feedback from employees in 50 stores about where their workflows were breaking down. One new feature, Scan to Divert, has already contributed to $25 million in value that Target says can be reinvested in the guest experience and store operations.
That number is the hiring story. Internal tools rarely get the same attention or talent as customer-facing ones, yet here is one feature in an employee app producing eight figures of value. The teams that build these tools, and the operators who decide what they should do, are worth a much closer look.
According to Target, the upgraded myDay app better assesses real-time inventory needs, team availability, and sales forecasting. It groups similar tasks together and ranks each employee's to-do list by urgency and value, so the most important work happens first.
Two new features stand out. myDay Leader View gives team leaders a personalized home screen with store updates and resources, which they can tailor by role, for example pinning shelf-stocking metrics or pickup-order fulfillment data. Scan to Divert tells employees whether a newly scanned product should go straight to the shelf or stay in the backroom, based on demand and available space.
Target says more is coming, including task assignment, shift handoff notes, and AI-enabled insights. The upgrade also connects to a priority the company has been talking about publicly. On Target's second-quarter earnings call in August, COO Lisa Roath pointed to the company's in-stock position on back-to-school items as an area of improvement it was "really proud of."
| What the app does | What it depends on | Who has to own it |
|---|---|---|
| Ranks tasks by urgency and value | A clear model of what each task is worth | Analytics and store operations |
| Scan to Divert: shelf or backroom | Accurate demand and space data by store | Inventory, replenishment, and planning |
| Leader View by role | Knowing what each leader actually needs to see | Product management and UX research |
| Pickup fulfillment metrics | Store labor tied to digital order flow | Omnichannel fulfillment |
| Coming AI-enabled insights | Clean data and people who can act on it | Retail technology and data science |
An employee app is a product, with users, a roadmap, and adoption metrics, but it is often managed like an IT project. The difference shows up quickly. A product manager asks which tasks waste the most time on a Tuesday afternoon and builds for that. A project manager ships the requirements and moves on.
This sits in our Retail & Digital Technology practice. Look for product managers who have shipped tools for store, warehouse, or field teams and can tell you how usage changed after launch, not just that the launch happened on time. Our guide to hiring for retail technology roles covers how these teams are structured.
Target's upgrade started with feedback from employees in 50 stores. That kind of input does not happen by accident. Someone has to design the research, visit the stores, watch how work actually gets done, and turn what they hear into product decisions.
That is Creative & UX/UI work, but with a different user than most UX candidates are used to. The strongest candidates have designed for people who are standing, moving, wearing gloves, or helping a customer at the same time. Ask for examples of research done on location, not just in a lab or over video.
Scan to Divert makes a simple call, shelf or backroom, but the logic behind it is not simple. It depends on accurate demand forecasts by store, an understanding of shelf capacity, and rules for when to break them. When that logic is wrong, the app confidently sends product to the wrong place.
Ownership usually sits with inventory, replenishment, and planning leaders in our Supply Chain & Operations practice, working closely with Merchandising & Buying. Our guide to hiring a Merchandise Planner for omnichannel retail covers the planning side, and our post on the cost of a bad supply chain hire shows what happens when this layer is weak.
Leader View lets team leaders pin pickup-order fulfillment data next to shelf-stocking metrics. That is a small design choice with a big implication: digital order flow is now part of the store's daily operating picture, competing for the same people and the same hours as restocking.
Balancing the two takes an omnichannel fulfillment leader who understands both store operations and digital demand. Our guide to hiring an Omnichannel Fulfillment Manager covers the profile, and our post on how the omnichannel manager role is splitting apart explains why this is increasingly its own job.
Ranking a to-do list "by urgency and value" sounds straightforward until someone has to define value. Is restocking a fast-selling item worth more than staging a pickup order due in an hour? The answer is a model, and that model is built and maintained by analytics talent.
That is Analytics & Data Science work. Look for analysts who have built labor, forecasting, or task-prioritization models and then watched how store teams responded to them. With AI-enabled insights on Target's roadmap, this connects to the ownership question we raised in hiring a Head of AI Transformation for retail, and to Target's own AI work we covered in its wish list personalization push.
The best store tools are built by people who have spent time in stores. If your retail technology team has never watched an associate try to use what they built, that is the first gap to close.
Most retailers will never build an app at Target's scale. But almost every retailer has store teams using some combination of handhelds, task lists, and inventory tools, and almost every one has room to make them better. The question is who owns that work.
myDay is Target's store operations app for employees. In October 2026, Target said the upgraded app better assesses real-time inventory needs, team availability, and sales forecasting, groups similar tasks, and ranks to-do lists by urgency and value. It also added a personalized myDay Leader View for team leaders and a Scan to Divert feature.
Scan to Divert helps store employees decide whether a newly scanned product should go to the sales floor or stay in the backroom, based on demand and available space. Target said the feature contributed to $25 million in value that can be reinvested in the guest experience and store operations.
Target gathered input from employees across 50 stores about where their workflows were breaking down, and used that feedback to shape the upgrades.
Five functions carry most of the work: product managers who build tools for store teams rather than shoppers, UX researchers and designers who study how associates actually work, inventory and replenishment leaders who own the logic behind decisions like Scan to Divert, omnichannel fulfillment leaders who connect pickup and delivery orders to store labor, and analytics talent who build the forecasting and prioritization models.