I decide which customer problems our product teams fund by asking what the store or yard must do to keep the promise a screen makes.
I lead product at Tolvercroft Home & Lumber Company, a family-controlled home-improvement and building-materials retailer founded in Yakima, Washington, in 1951. We trade from 58 locations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana: 44 home centres with drive-through lumber yards and 14 yards that serve trade customers only. Revenue in the year to 31 January 2026 was US$1.62 billion, and professional contractors produced 47 per cent of it. As chief product officer I report to our chief executive and lead 172 people in product management, design, research, analytics and engineering. Payments security, the merchandising system and store infrastructure sit with our chief information officer.
I first worked for Tolvercroft behind a pro desk in Yakima, copying contractors' faxed orders onto carbon pick tickets and walking them out to the yard. I left in 2007 to build web products at a garden catalogue retailer in Portland and then at a company selling software to independent lumber dealers. I returned in January 2017 to build our digital channels. Each setting taught me the same lesson from a different side: customers judge a digital promise by what happens at the counter, the gate or the loading bay, and the people working there rarely chose the promise.
The three cases on this site show how that view shapes what I fund and what I retire. I delayed contractor order-ahead pickup by five months so that yard crews had a handheld pick list first. I moved our largest trade accounts out of a household points programme that was paying them for purchases they would have made anyway. I replaced emails that guessed customers' home projects with a list customers write themselves. Each decision cost something visible, and I report those costs beside the gains.
Order-ahead arrived after the yard could see it
Contractor order-ahead pickup reached all 58 yards in November 2022, five months later than our pro sales team wanted. By fiscal 2025 it carried 26 per cent of contractor app orders, and the median wait for a staged order was seven minutes.
Trade rewards rebuilt around delivery
Moving 4,200 large trade accounts from points to delivery credits cut programme cost from US$15.8 million to US$10.9 million a year. About 1,100 mid-sized contractors received less value, a figure we stated in the decision paper.
Projects customers name themselves
Replacing inferred-project emails with a customer-written project list reduced attributed sales from US$6.4 million to US$3.9 million in the first year. Complaints about those messages fell from about 1,900 to fewer than 100.
Current focus
I am rebuilding the in-stock promise on our website and apps so that it reflects the count an aisle or yard can actually support at the hour a customer arrives, and agreeing with store operations which features we will retire to give associates that time back.
Conversations I welcome
I am open to a first independent board seat at a consumer business outside home improvement and building materials, with about 24 days a year available, subject to my chief executive's consent and a review of supplier and software-vendor relationships.
