CASE STUDY
Executive Visioning & Alignment
Breaking a decade of enterprise decision gridlock to create a shared Electronic Shelf Label pilot direction
Domain: Strategic Facilitation, Executive Alignment & Transformation Enablement
Timeline: 1 full-day Workshop; 4-week preparation and synthesis phase
Role: Senior Experience Designer (Service Design), Workshop Strategy & Facilitation Lead
Process Phase: Enable
OVERVIEW
Executive alignment turned a decade of stalled effort into a plan of action for the future.
After more than a decade of stalled progress, executive alignment was needed to move forward with Electronic Shelf Labels in retail stores. This required cutting through silos, past failures, and politics to define what to pilot and how.
Role: I co-designed and co-led a high-stakes hybrid decision-making workshop that brought senior leaders across brands and business functions together to prioritize use cases, surface risk, and establish a common pilot direction
Impact: The work broke long-standing decision gridlock, resulting in consensus on four priority ESL use cases, and surfaced six cross-functional themes that directly shaped pilot scope, sequencing and investment.
Solution: Delivered a full‑day, interactive executive workshop experience, complete with high‑fidelity activities, facilitation tooling, and a repeatable playbook that turned abstract debate into actionable direction. Outputs directly fed in-store planning and became a scalable template for future sessions.
Workshop Outcomes
-
A hybrid workshop aligned leaders on four high-value ESL use cases for pilot testing after years of stalled progress.
-
Surfaced six cross-functional risk themes (labor, usability, feasibility, operations, sales, business impact) to inform smarter pilot design.
-
Accelerated decision-making by creating shared clarity and direction across brand, business, and functional leaders via interactive workshop activities.
-
Workshop outputs directly shaped in-store pilot scope, sequencing, and implementation next steps.
-
Established a clearer view of how ESLs impact both associate efficiency and customer experience.
-
Created reusable activities and a facilitation guide that can support future cross-functional alignment sessions.
Participants were broken out into 4 groups: Yellow, Red, Blue or Green
Activity 1: Participants diverged into breakout rooms where they completed an async worksheet for their personal "bids" using dot stickers. Participants then reviewed and discussed their bids in their breakout groups, identifying their collective top 3 use cases to move forward into the next round.
Activity 2: Completed boards and reasoning were then shared with the broader group.
Activity 2: All participants converged by leveraging MoSCoW to prioritize 4 use cases using rationale from activity 1 to support group discussion.
Activities 3 & 4: Each participant rotated through 4 breakout rooms, each focusing on ideating risks for a prioritized use case. Risks and rationale were then shared with the full group before moving into a final voting session.
-
Activity 1: Contestant's Row
Diverge: Participants allocated hypothetical “bid money” across ESL use cases, justifying choices to peers.
-
Activity 2: Bidding Showcase
Converge: Groups shared spend rationale and collectively applied MoSCoW prioritization to converge on four top use cases.
-
Activity 3: Four Corners Challenge
Diverge: Teams brainstormed success hypotheses for each use case by Viable, Usable, Feasible, and Valuable categories, then voted on critical risks.
-
Activity 4: Final Showcase
Converge: Groups shared risks and voted to finalize pilot testing sequence.
Continue the journey by reading these related case studies.
-
Reveal: Nexus Persona Ecosystem
Turn research into shared understanding.
I built and activated an enterprise ecosystem of 30+ validated personas, supported by AI-enabled research workflows, training, activation tools, and a maturity framework that embeds insight into everyday decision-making.
-
Translate: Enterprise Journey Management
Create a shared view of the end-to-end experience.
I established and lead the organization’s foundational Journey Management capability, connecting customer journeys, associate service blueprints, and scalable governance to uncover systemic gaps and inform experience strategy.
-
Transform: Legacy System Modernization
Design across people, processes, and technology.
I led a major enterprise modernization initiative consolidating multiple legacy systems and 40+ fragmented workflows into a single future-state concept, aligning leadership on a multi-million-dollar investment strategy.