05.LEADERSHIPSenior Manager, Product Design · Kroger · 2022—2025

I led design for a $1.35B retail profit engine.

My role
Principal design lead — led a team of 4 (five people over three years, 100% retained), plus 2 designers and 1 researcher dotted-line for the program. Research through blueprint; co-owned MVP scope with PM
The problem
A $1.35B Kroger Alternative Profit business where 10+ teams disagreed on what problem was even being solved
What I did
Ran research and ideation to a 5-year directional picture, then service blueprints that became the alignment artifact. Partnered with 84.51° and product on the ROI case for what we did — and didn’t — build
Outcome
150+ touchpoints mapped across 9 blueprints · scope discipline came free from the framing

Kroger — a Fortune 25 retailer doing $148B a year. Inside it sits the Alternative Profit business — credit, gift card, lottery, money services, compliance, sports betting, and the screens you see at every checkout kiosk. That business delivered $1.35B in operating profit in FY2024. I led design strategy across all of it, ran the design team, and partnered with 10+ teams across the company.

Reinventing Credit at Scale: the Kroger app at the centre of loyalty, credit, KPF, merchandising, marketing, data and analytics, compliance and POS
The ecosystem in one frame — eight domains that all had a claim on the same customer moment. Getting them to agree on one picture was most of the job.
Reinventing Credit at Scale From fragmented card journeys to a unified, loyalty-bound experience Customer Mobile App Credit Personal Finance Merchandising Experience Marketing Data & Analytics Issuing Bank Compliance POS Loyalty My role Principal design lead — research to strategy to blueprinting — led five designers, co-owned MVP scope with PM. Loyalty Credit Personal Finance Merchandising Experience Marketing POS Compliance Issuing bank partner
Reinventing Credit at Scale — the flagship program. New application flow, redesigned dashboard, restructured rewards, all rebuilt around how shoppers actually use the card.

The vision that anchored the MVP

Before any blueprint or spec, we ran research and ideation on where this product needed to be in five years. Not a feature list — a directional picture of how the customer's relationship with credit should feel by 2030, and what role the retailer played in it. That picture became the constraint everything downstream had to serve. The MVP wasn't "the smallest thing we can ship" — it was "the smallest thing we can ship that's a real first step toward that future."

What the work actually was

Most of what I did there wasn't pixels. It was getting 10+ teams across the company to agree on what problem we were even solving. Service blueprints became the way I did that. Nine of them, across 150+ touchpoints, mapping how a customer experiences the financial ecosystem from the moment they tap a credit offer in the app to the moment they redeem points at the register six months later.

Once the blueprint was on the wall, the meeting changed. Engineering stopped arguing about their slice. Product stopped arguing about theirs. The conversation moved up a level — what should the customer feel here, what's the trade-off, what do we ship first. The blueprints stopped being deliverables and started being the language the org used to talk about itself.

One of nine service blueprints, shown in full: application, onboarding and account creation mapped across customer actions, frontstage, backstage and supporting systems
One of the nine service blueprints, whole. Application, onboarding and account creation — customer actions along the top, then frontstage, backstage, and every supporting system underneath. Shown at full extent rather than zoomed in: the scope is the point, and the contents stay where they belong. This is what executives ended up pointing at in funding meetings.

What it shipped to

The Credit Reinvention program — the flagship of the work — touched the application flow, the account creation experience, the dashboard, the offers surface, points, savings. Nine screens that customers used millions of times.

$35M+ in funded initiatives shaped by the work
9 blueprints across 150+ touchpoints
100% team retention through a major restructure

If a feature didn’t ladder up to the five-year vision, it didn’t make the cut.

The money part

I never held the budget — that wasn’t my role. What I held was whether we were pointed at something worth funding. I worked with 84.51°, Kroger’s data science arm, to pull the metrics behind a feature bet, and with the product managers to pressure-test whether a direction actually returned anything. Design gets a lot more say in the roadmap once it shows up with the ROI case instead of a rationale.

He has a laser-focus on business needs and is fully versed in the financial and operational aspects that drive product strategy. I learned a great deal from his ability to balance design excellence with budget and business priorities.
Ronan RooneyDigital Media Creator & Visual DesignerReported to Dmitri
Dmitri led a talented team of four product designers, and under his leadership I watched each of them truly grow and thrive. His impact is evident in the success of the people he leads.
Dina PurteeProduct Manager, CSPO/CSMCross-functional peer

The team part

I held 100% retention through a major org restructuring — not because I'm a magnet, but because the work was strategic enough that designers wanted to stay close to it. We stopped being the team that made screens for other teams. We started being the team that decided what got built.

The early AI signal

Toward the end of my time there I started operationalizing agentic AI workflows — ChatGPT, n8n, Gamma — for research synthesis and executive deck creation. Days became minutes. At the time it felt like a small productivity win. Looking back, it was the prototype of the operating system I'd later build in retail tech and at Focus Agents. Same instinct, earlier, smaller scale.