Twenty-seven years on both sides of the counter

The first ordering system I worked with was a fax machine. In the summer of 1997, between years at Hallenmoor State University, I staffed the pro desk at Tolvercroft's Yakima yard. Framing contractors faxed lists of lumber, sheathing and fasteners the night before, and we rewrote them on carbon pick tickets for the yard crew. A misread line meant a truck left with the wrong length of joist and came back at noon. Nobody called that product design, but the quality of the handover decided whether a contractor's crew worked that afternoon.

I graduated in May 1999 with a degree in business administration and joined Tolvercroft's pro-sales training programme. Within two years I was pro-desk lead in Yakima, responsible for six desk associates and the order flow to a yard crew of about twenty. Contractors valued a predictable morning more than a cheap one. A price concession was forgotten by Friday; a forty-minute wait at the gate was remembered for months.

In 2003 I moved to head office as a store-systems analyst while the company introduced handheld scanners for receiving and cycle counts. My job was to watch how associates used them, record where the process broke and argue for changes with the vendor and our own operations team. Most failures were not software defects. A scanner could record a count accurately while the yard had no spare hour in which to take it. That was when I understood that a tool's real cost includes the minutes it removes from someone else's shift.

I wanted to learn how products were built rather than adopted, so in April 2007 I joined Peverline Garden Supply in Portland as a web product manager. Peverline sold garden tools, seed and outdoor-living goods by catalogue and was moving its customers online. Over five years we raised web orders from 31 to 68 per cent of the total and more than halved the catalogue's circulation. I also learnt what retiring something costs. Customers who had ordered by telephone for twenty years needed a reason and a path, not an announcement.

From 2012 to 2016 I led product management at Quillstead Dealer Software in Denver, which sold point-of-sale, quoting and yard-dispatch software to about 1,100 independent lumber and building-material dealers. Building for many dealers at once showed me how differently yards are run. A screen that saved time at a dealer with a covered shed could add a step at one with an open yard under snow. Dealers adopted our contractor online-ordering module slowly, and the obstacle was usually the yard rather than the screen.

Tolvercroft asked me back in January 2017 as vice-president of digital product. Our website then showed prices and products but not whether an item was available at a given store. We built pickup for household customers in 2018 and the contractor app in 2019. I became chief product officer in March 2021, when engineering moved into my organisation so that one leader answers both for what we build and for how well it runs.

My working method has changed less than my title. Before we fund a customer problem, a product manager and a designer spend time with the people who will carry out the result, usually in a yard at six in the morning or at the pickup counter on a Saturday. We write down what those associates will stop doing to make room for the new work, and we set the measure that would tell us to stop. Each January we also name features to retire, because a retailer's app collects promises faster than its stores can keep them.

I lead through a small number of written decisions rather than a large number of meetings. I share the cases in which I was overruled as readily as the ones I carried, because product teams learn more from the reasoning than from the result. Our chief financial officer and I review loyalty and trade-account economics together each quarter, and I report twice a year to our audit committee on how customer data is used.

I am now preparing for a first independent board seat in another consumer business. I would bring one practical question, which is who keeps the promise a company makes through its app or programme, and a habit of counting what a decision gives up. I would also need to learn that company's economics before offering a view on them.

Open to Board appointments

Languages / English · Spanish (working)