#239: Mustafa Bartin: Chief Retail-Operations Officer

Mustafa Bartın is a ‘first-generation Online Grocery Veteran’ having spent more than 25 years in Retail and IT industries. He graduated from the Middle East Technical University, Department of Industrial Engineering. He started his professional life in Migros. He was the project manager of MİGROS Sanal Market (MİGROS online), the very first online grocery operation in Europe by October 1997. He left Migros in 2000 to move to the other side of the table, as a sales Professional in Hewlett-Packard.

Between 2000 and 2009 he worked for Hewlett-Packard holding various different roles in Sales/Business Development/Consulting. He served as Country Manager of HP Consulting Business Unit before leaving HP.

‘Having never lost the passion for Retail’, he rejoined Migros family in 2009 as the Chief Digital Officer of the company, ( responsible for IT, CRM and Migros Online ). Small note: Official title was never CDO. He was officially named as CIO by then. But years after, CDO position became very popular in enterprise World and he and his CEO recognised the fact that the role was literally a CDO role. He can be classified as a ‘professional convert from technology to business’ triggered by his appointment to Chief ‘Alternative Sales Channels’ Officer role in charge of MİGROS Online, Migros International and MİGROS Wholesale Operations. This role enabled his transition to business for his future assignments. From mid – 2018 till mid 2020, Bartın worked as Chief ‘Large Format & Online Retail’ Officer ( another CXO role which nobody have heard anywhere else ) to realize company’s Online-Offline Integration ( O2O ) mission.

He has been Chief Retail Operations Officer since July 2020 in charge of 2700 stores and Online operations, which is one of the rare ‘reverse organisational takeovers’ in the industry. He is married and has two children, having lost all of his hobbies after being a very late father at his 40’s. He avoids using Instagram and the other social media tools ( other than LinkedIn ) even though he is a digital-native person and he is proud of this. He tries to divide his time between his family, business and his mountain-house near Istanbul. His magic Word in his everyday-life dictionary is ‘CANDOR’ at all cost and at all frontiers. He always advices himself and his mentees ‘to listen other people just to understand’ and to go into a ‘silent’ mode whenever possible, even in very ‘noisy’ environments.