Desk, analyst, vendor and back again

Mandate

Bring product and engineering under one leader and decide which customer and associate problems the company funds and retires.

Outcomes

• Launched contractor order-ahead in all 58 yards after building the yard pick list first; 26 per cent of contractor app orders by fiscal 2025
• Moved 4,200 large trade accounts from points to delivery credits, reducing programme cost from US$15.8 million to US$10.9 million
• Replaced inferred-project emails with customer-written project lists created by 214,000 members
• Retired the desktop quote builder after moving the saved quotes of about 900 trade accounts

Decisions in context

The chief executive created this role when she concluded that product and engineering were negotiating with each other more than with customers. Bringing 118 engineers into my organisation made me answerable for reliability as well as roadmaps, which changed how I weigh new work against fixing what already exists. I chair a monthly review with store operations at which every planned release states the associate time it adds or removes. I present the annual product investment plan to the board and report to the audit committee on how we use customer data in rewards and personalisation. Payments security and store infrastructure remain with our chief information officer, and I do not set prices or merchandise assortments. The three cases on this site all come from this appointment, and each one involved a colleague who disagreed with me for sound reasons.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; preparing for a first independent board seat with my chief executive's knowledge.

Mandate

Turn a price-and-catalogue website into channels customers could order through and associates could fulfil.

Outcomes

• Launched household pickup in every location during 2018
• Launched the contractor app in 2019, reaching 9,400 active trade accounts by January 2022
• Added store-level availability to product pages, with stated limits for long lumber and sheet goods

Decisions in context

I came back to a company that knew its contractors well and its online customers hardly at all. The website showed products and prices; it could not tell anyone whether a bundle of studs was in the Spokane yard that afternoon. My first decision was to delay a redesign of the website's appearance and spend the year on store-level availability instead, because pickup was impossible without it. Household pickup reached every location in 2018 and the contractor app followed in 2019. Engineering then sat with the chief information officer, so every release was a negotiation across two organisations with different measures. That arrangement taught me the value of shared targets and also its limits. During the 2020 surge in home projects, pickup volumes tripled within weeks, and the counters, not the software, set our real capacity.

Reason for the move

Appointed chief product officer when engineering moved into the product organisation.

Mandate

Give the product a roadmap shaped by how dealers' counters and yards actually work.

Outcomes

• Launched a contractor online-ordering module adopted by 210 dealers by the end of 2016
• Rebuilt the yard-dispatch screens after field visits to 40 dealers
• Introduced dealer advisory groups that reviewed each release before general availability

Decisions in context

Quillstead's customers were family dealers, many with one or two yards, who bought software to run their counters and rarely had time to learn a new screen. I spent my first month riding with dealers' delivery drivers and standing at their counters before proposing any change. The visits showed that a dispatch screen designed in Denver assumed a covered shed and a dry yard that many dealers did not have. We rebuilt it around what a yard foreman could do with cold hands and a phone. The contractor online-ordering module taught me a harder lesson. Dealers liked it in demonstrations and adopted it slowly, because accepting orders overnight required a morning staging process most yards lacked. I left wanting to solve that problem from inside a retailer, where I could change the yard as well as the screen.

Reason for the move

Returned to Tolvercroft to build digital products as a retailer rather than as a vendor.

Mandate

Move catalogue customers online without losing the long-standing telephone buyers who produced much of the profit.

Outcomes

• Raised web orders from 31 to 68 per cent of the total
• Launched order-status pages that reduced order-enquiry calls by about 40 per cent
• Cut catalogue circulation by more than half while keeping a telephone-ordering path for long-standing customers

Decisions in context

Peverline gave me my first title with product in it and my first experience of retiring something customers loved. Its catalogue had arrived in many households every February for decades, and a meaningful share of customers still ordered by telephone. The obvious plan was to cut circulation sharply and send everyone to the website. We tested smaller cuts first, measured which customers stopped buying altogether and kept a printed edition and a staffed telephone line for them. The web store improvements were less dramatic than the order-status pages, which removed a large share of the calls asking where a parcel was. I also learnt to work without engineers reporting to me, persuading a shared technology team with evidence rather than authority. Those five years taught me how a direct business pays for every promise in its contact centre.

Reason for the move

Joined a software vendor to build products used at many dealers' counters and yards.

Mandate

Make the new handheld scanners work for the associates expected to use them.

Outcomes

• Documented associate workflows across 22 locations before the handheld receiving rollout
• Moved long-lumber cycle counts away from the yard's two busiest morning hours, raising completed counts from 64 to 91 per cent
• Wrote the first associate-time estimates included in a store-systems investment case

Decisions in context

This role moved me from serving customers to watching colleagues use tools someone else had chosen. Tolvercroft was replacing paper receiving logs and annual stocktakes with handheld scanners and rolling cycle counts. I spent most weeks in stores, recording how receiving clerks and yard associates actually worked and where the new process broke. The vendor wanted defect reports; most of what I found were scheduling problems. Counts were planned for the yard's busiest morning hours, so they were skipped, and the inventory figures that later fed our website began life as missed counts. I wrote associate-time estimates into the business case for the next phase, which the director of store systems presented to the operations committee. By 2007 I wanted to understand how products were designed before they reached a store, which led me to a role building them.

Reason for the move

Left to learn how products are built rather than adopted.

Mandate

Learn trade selling and keep contractor orders moving from desk to yard without errors.

Outcomes

• Introduced a next-morning staging bay for faxed contractor orders, used for about 60 orders a day by 2002
• Reduced truckloads returned for mis-picked lengths from about eleven a month to three
• Trained nine new pro-desk associates on contractor accounts and yard procedures

Decisions in context

I joined Tolvercroft's pro-sales training programme after university because I already knew the Yakima yard from summer work. The training covered estimating, credit accounts and the products contractors bought most, but the real education came at six in the morning, when fifteen framing crews wanted their orders at once. As desk lead from 2001, I managed six associates and the handover to a yard crew of about twenty. The staging bay began as an experiment: we picked faxed orders the evening before and tagged them by contractor, so the morning queue became a collection rather than a search. Returned loads fell because yard associates were no longer reading a hurried desk scrawl in the dark. I learnt that contractors judged us by the first hour of their day, and that the people who protected that hour seldom appeared in a sales report.

Reason for the move

Moved to head office to work on the store-systems programme.