How McMaster-Carr Builds High-Impact Engineering Teams

What It’s Like to Work on Engineering Teams at McMaster-Carr

For Director of Software Engineering Justin Wedell, understanding the “why” behind the work is just as important as strong coding skills.

He said that every engineering project at McMaster-Carr happens for a reason, whether that’s improving the search experience or optimizing product recommendations. That’s why, when a new project begins, Wedell makes sure that everyone understands what they’re trying to achieve while providing them with the resources and people they need to get there. 

“When done well, this allows the team to make good decisions about where they are spending their time and pick the right strategies to achieve their objectives,” he said.

Wedell’s support manifests in other ways as well, particularly in how he builds team culture. Alongside fostering social connection through coffee chats and outings, Justin cultivates a team environment where talented engineers learn from one another. This goes hand in hand with a focus on career growth, which he fosters through one-on-one coaching and project involvement.

According to Wedell, creating this type of environment doesn’t just help engineers thrive — it benefits the business as a whole. 

“Having a strong team culture helps engineers advance high-quality work at a rapid pace because they’ve built trust with their teammates and have developed a set of processes tailored to the needs of the project,” he said.

By sharing clear objectives and shaping a tight-knit culture, Wedell empowers engineers with the opportunities and support they need to successfully innovate at McMaster-Carr. Read on to see what else he had to say about his leadership vision, what it’s like to work on his team and what you gain by building a tech career at the company. 

Justin Wedell

Director of Software Engineering  • McMaster-Carr

How Justin Wedell Leads With Clarity and Purpose

What’s your vision for leading your team?

The most important thing I do as a director is work with project teams to translate company-level strategic direction, such as creating a differentiated search experience for customers, into clear project objectives they focus on pursuing. From there, I can make sure they have the right people and resources to achieve those objectives. Rather than telling my team what to do or how to do it, I spend a lot of time building clarity around why we’re funding the project and what we’re hoping to get from it. When done well, this allows the team to make good decisions about where they are spending their time and pick the right strategies to achieve their objectives. Of course, although it sounds straightforward, doing this well is challenging, and it’s a place where I continue to learn new tactics and grow. 

How McMaster-Carr Builds Strong Engineering Team Culture

How do you build team culture, and why is that important for the work that you do?

From my perspective, team culture has two components. The first is the interpersonal connections teammates have with each other. I like to be intentional about creating time and space for these connections to emerge. What exactly this looks like varies from team to team but might include team tea times and coffee chats, team outings, team lunches and other dedicated time to connecting with coworkers.

The second is the way the team works. This is a mixture of formal processes and norms — merge requests, sync-up meetings and retrospectives — and informal ways of working. In my experience, ways of working best match the needs of a given team when the team members themselves play a role in defining and iterating on them. On my teams, engineers have the space to define the processes that will work well for the project and reflect periodically on how they want those processes and norms to evolve.
 

“On my teams, engineers have the space to define the processes that will work well for the project and reflect periodically on how they want those processes and norms to evolve.”

How Engineers Grow Their Careers at McMaster-Carr

How do you help your team grow their careers? What tools and support do you offer to allow them to stretch their skills?

Career growth can mean different things to different people. For some engineers and managers, it means growing their impact in the organization and contributing to larger projects. For others, it means building more depth in new technologies or becoming an expert at a particular skill. At McMaster-Carr, individuals can try out both managerial roles and engineering roles rather than needing to commit to a path, so growth can also look like preparing for a different role.

I like to work with individual team members to set one or two explicit development goals they focus on advancing. Once we’ve established these development goals, I work to connect them to resources, coaching tools or mentoring to help them advance their goal. In some cases, that might mean books or external resources. In others, it might mean hands-on coaching from me or another leader in the organization. I like this approach because it helps those on my team focus on advancing the skills that are most important for their version of career growth. It also creates accountability for both me and the other individual, because we reflect monthly on progress toward their development goals and whether we need to adjust the approach we’re taking. 

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How McMaster-Carr Uses Machine Learning and LLMs to Improve Search

What is something exciting that you are currently working on with your team?

This is a tough question because my team is advancing so many different ideas for improving the customer experience, and it’s hard to pick just one! One broad topic my team is taking on that I’m excited about is thinking through how to leverage the latest generation of natural language processing technologies to improve our search and navigation experience. McMaster-Carr has been the vanguard for using machine learning technologies for search for a long time; it’s why customers often call out our search engine as a differentiating part of our website and mobile apps. The newest LLMs offer the opportunity to make our search experience even better. We now have the ability at our fingertips to quickly make sense of images of products, translate foreign language industrial terminology correctly, and provide an interactive chat experience to clarify customer intent and recommend products in the context of a specific customer’s needs. 

“McMaster-Carr has been the vanguard for using machine learning technologies for search for a long time; it’s why customers often call out our search engine as a differentiating part of our website and mobile apps.”

But this opportunity comes with corresponding challenges: How do we mitigate the slow responsiveness of LLMs? How do we make sure that search or other navigation tools return credible responses and don’t undermine our reputation? Where do less sophisticated but faster technologies still make sense? The combination of significant business impact with interesting technical challenges is an exciting prospect. 

Your career at McMaster-Carr spans multiple roles and levels. What moments or experiences along that path most shaped your growth from individual contributor to director?

Much of being a director at McMaster-Carr is about helping teams figure out what it is we’re trying to do. The first project I worked on that really stretched me in that regard was leading an effort to build software that reused the product information, product organization and assets like images and copy to create new pages for our print catalog. There were a lot of different ideas about what the purpose of the project was, such as helping the team in marketing that built out the print catalog become more efficient, updating print catalog pages more frequently, or retiring the old and poorly operating incumbent software being used to build the catalog. I had to work through the different ideas, spend time with company leaders to understand their perspective, and try to come up with a rationalized view of the whole that established the core mission. Ultimately, we chose to focus on making sure we were using the same software and product information to drive our print and digital experiences. 

Some of those other goals needed to be set aside. Of course, there were many interesting technical challenges as well, such as figuring out the right approach to building an InDesign plugin and making some of our product information software libraries truly general purpose, but the experience setting direction when the goals were ambiguous helped me build the skill set I now use as a director.

Why Engineers Build Long-Term Careers at McMaster-Carr

What is the employee value proposition for those thinking about joining McMaster-Carr? What impact does working there have on someone’s career?

I think McMaster-Carr offers several unique things in the broader tech jobs marketplace. First, we are deeply committed to a generalist model. We offer engineers and managers the chance to pivot products, technologies and topics every year or two. As a result, engineers often stay with us much longer than those at other technology companies because they can keep growing and learning without needing to leave the company. My own career is a good example: My first engineering assignment was setting up and creating automating configuration for the Elasticsearch cluster that our search engine uses. After that, I worked on training and deploying ML models that predicted which product specifications customers wanted to filter on. After that, I worked on a series of front-end changes to improve the filtering panel experience for customers on our website. Each assignment brought new technologies and new opportunities to learn and have an impact on the business, so I never felt like I was treading water.

Second, our company operates with a long-term strategic horizon. We’re a private company that’s more than 100 years old that plans for the next decade, not the next quarter’s results. We’ve never conducted layoffs in our century in business, we don’t have such a thing as “crunch time,” and we often choose to build things in a durable, fault-resilient way rather than cutting corners in an attempt to decrease short-term costs. It’s another reason why so many of our engineers stay with us for a long time.

Although we’re growing quickly by adding teams, we organize around small teams that support, improve, and extend enterprise-scale systems. For that to work, everyone working here needs to have strong engineering chops, ownership over outcomes and systems, and the ability to communicate and collaborate well. The talent we attract and retain means that engineers here are constantly learning from each other and supporting each other in their work. This is a place where we really walk the walk. New engineers often report surprise at how easy it is to learn and get help from other engineers here.

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