CASE STUDY
Executive Visioning Workshop
Turning Decades of Challenges and Stalled Progress into a Actionable Pilot Roadmap for Electronic Shelf Labels
Domain: Workshop Design & Facilitation (Enterprise Executive)
Timeline: 1 full-day Workshop; 4-week preparation and synthesis phase
Role: Lead UX Designer, Workshop Facilitator, & Strategist
Process Phase: Reveal
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: As a lead UX Designer, Workshop Facilitator, and Strategist, I co-designed and co-led a high-stakes hybrid executive workshop that brought together 24 senior leaders across brands and multiple business functions.
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
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A hybrid workshop aligned leaders on four high-value ESL use cases for pilot testing after years of stalled progress.
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Surfaced six cross-functional risk themes (labor, usability, feasibility, operations, sales, business impact) to inform smarter pilot design.
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Accelerated decision-making by creating shared clarity and direction across brand, business, and functional leaders via interactive workshop activities.
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Workshop outputs directly shaped in-store pilot scope, sequencing, and implementation next steps.
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Established a clearer view of how ESLs impact both associate efficiency and customer experience.
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Delivered high-fidelity activities, artifacts, and a facilitation guide, creating a repeatable template for future 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.
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Activity 1: Contestant's Row
Diverge: Participants allocated hypothetical “bid money” across ESL use cases, justifying choices to peers.
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Activity 2: Bidding Showcase
Converge: Groups shared spend rationale and collectively applied MoSCoW prioritization to converge on four top use cases.
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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.
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Activity 4: Final Showcase
Converge: Groups shared risks and voted to finalize pilot testing sequence.
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Reveal: Nexus Persona Ecosystem
Personas show who does the work.
Nexus personas informed this workshop, equipping facilitators and stakeholders with a baseline associate experience understanding to guide research based decision-making.
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Translate: Journey Framework & Mapping
Journeys illustrate what matters when.
Journey mapping reinforced price related pain points from the customer and associate perspectives, supporting process and technological improvements.
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Create: In-Store Item Management
UX brings it to life.
A defined understanding of current complex pricing related workflows from Item Management were leveraged to support the pursual of ESL’s as a viable solution.