Where LMS sits in Lowe's ecosystem
LMS is the hub where leads are created, managed, and sold — fed by associates, PROviders, and IHSS, and connected onward into Design Hub, lowes.com, and Lowe's Project Dashboard.
No system, no visibility
Kitchen associates had no standardized way to capture leads — the process ran on sticky notes, notebooks, and memory. Leads were lost, follow-ups missed, and pipeline health was invisible above the store level.
As Design Lead, I partnered with PM, engineering, and research to build LMS from the ground up — capturing leads, managing them to a scheduled appointment, and tracking status across the full lifecycle.
Three converging issues
- No system of record. Associates and stores had no standardized way to capture leads, and store managers had no visibility into pipeline health as a result.
- Inconsistent intake. Every associate asked different questions, so leads often reached the design consultation missing key details.
- No pipeline visibility. Managers couldn't see what was open, overdue, or converting — coaching and forecasting were guesswork.
The challenge: a fast, guided intake associates would actually use on the sales floor — without turning a conversation into a form-filling exercise.
Grounded in the sales floor, not assumptions
I partnered with our research team to conduct store visits, sitting down with kitchen specialists to understand their current process, surface gaps, and identify opportunities. These visits confirmed every associate and store handled it differently — some used personal notebooks, others sticky notes or calendars — with no standardized way to record customer contact or project information. That inconsistency also meant store managers had no reliable way to see pipeline health or reporting across their team.
- Associates avoided anything that felt like "admin work" in front of a customer.
- Sensitive questions (budget) needed soft framing — coaching on how to ask, not just what.
- Scheduling was a major drop-off point without a clear next step.
Beyond individual store visits, I mapped the full kitchen project journey in collaboration with Product Partners during a series of workshops — covering every persona (DIFM, Pro, DIYer, Red Vest Associate, self-service) across the entire process, from lead generation through purchase, and where each step actually happens.
From admin task to guided conversation
Project Information → Contact Information → Schedule Appointment, with clear progress and required-vs-optional labeling — so associates move at conversation speed, not spreadsheet speed.
The "Useful Tips" panel shows exactly what to ask and how — right next to the live form. Training lives in the workflow, not a manual nobody reads.
No matching appointment slot? "Continue without Scheduling" auto-generates a 48-hour follow-up instead of dead-ending. No customer match? A direct path to add a new contact.
Leads organized by status — Overdue, Due, Open, Declined, Sold — instead of a flat list, so triage takes one glance, not a scan.
Impact
In 2026 YTD, LMS has processed nearly 75,000 leads system-wide — with over 26,400 converted to a sale and another 16,200 still active in the pipeline, a 35% lead-to-sale conversion rate overall. The system has also reached full adoption across all 1,744 stores.
Guiding associates on what to do next, not just what's happened
LMS currently shows status, but not always the next best action. We're building guided-action notifications that surface directly on a lead — starting with alerting associates when a customer has already submitted inspiration images to their Project Dashboard, so a lead doesn't go cold while something actionable is sitting unseen.
What I'd carry forward
This project ran about 12 months end to end — kickoff in January 2025, a 31-store pilot that September, and a nationwide release in January 2026. It tested every skill I had as a Lead: building alignment across PM, engineering, and business partners who each had a different definition of "done," while also setting a design template a Sr. Designer on my team could build from as we kept adding features. That template is still what we use today as we expand LMS into new categories, with the same goal — helping associates and designers stay focused on the customer, keep every lead moving, and ultimately turn that into a sale.