Kitchen Lead Management System

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.

• 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.

I partnered with our research team to conduct store visits with kitchen specialists, surfacing gaps and opportunities firsthand. Every associate and store handled intake differently — some used personal notebooks, others sticky notes or calendars — with no standardized way to record customer or project information.

• Admin work, avoided. Associates avoided anything that felt like "admin work" in front of a customer.
• Budget, framed carefully. Sensitive questions needed soft framing — coaching on how to ask, not just what.
• Scheduling drop-off. A major drop-off point without a clear next step.

Beyond individual store visits, I mapped the full kitchen project journey with Product Partners — 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.

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.