Using Service Design and Mapping at Kroger
Client: Kroger product teams
Role: Senior product designer
Collaborated with product managers, engineers, stakeholders and leadership
Available to Promise Stakeholder Map
Above is a stakeholder map I created to understand the people, teams, hierarchy, and connections that influenced my team’s work—whether through direct collaboration, decision-making, funding, or processes. At the center is my product team (managers, product managers, engineers, and research partners), branching outward into other Kroger teams and pillars we partnered with.
This was one of the first things I built when I joined the team, and it became an invaluable tool for learning names, roles, and relationships. To make the map more useful, we added quotes that captured each stakeholder’s typical requests or communication style—bringing a sense of personality and motivation to the diagram.
The most impactful addition, however, was labeling stakeholders as superheroes, stars, or roadblocks.
Superheroes: knowledgeable, supportive partners who could help secure approvals or prioritization.
Stars: key decision-makers with influence, though not always as close to us as the superheroes.
Roadblocks: stakeholders who required more preparation due to challenges or past friction.
This framework proved helpful for everything from small tasks—like planning workshops or sending invites—to bigger moments like preparing presentations and tailoring strategies for high-impact stakeholders. It’s a practice I plan to take with me for future design roles because it’s been so beneficial.
Note: All names have been changed to maintain confidentiality.
Planned Allocations (Promotional Supply Chain) Service Blueprint
This service blueprint was one of several created to map Kroger’s supply chain. The focus here was on the Allocations process—documenting the tasks, people, systems, interfaces, and data involved at each step. We gathered this information through interviews, observations, and artifact reviews. By engaging directly with the people performing the work and studying the tools they rely on, I not only captured the process but also uncovered gaps and pain points. In fact, the blueprint itself was less valuable than the insights it revealed—surfacing opportunities to ask How Might We (HMW) questions that could drive meaningful improvements.
The blueprint highlighted just how complex Allocations is: full of variables, dependencies, and opportunities for error. Stakeholders could make last-minute changes that disrupted the process, and while milestones and lockout dates existed, they often didn’t hold—changes were still made past deadlines. Through conversations, I learned this flexibility wasn’t negligence but a business necessity—sales fluctuations or hot product promotions demanded it. This reinforced the importance of balancing efficiency with adaptability when designing solutions.
Next, I’m developing a high-level presentation to share the process, gaps, pain points, and HMW questions with leadership and key stakeholders. From there, we’ll prioritize the HMWs on a difficulty/value matrix to guide discovery and make improvements to the process.
Available to Promise Product Roadmap
I partnered with my product team (product managers and engineers) to create our 2025 roadmap—many of the projects in my portfolio actually came from it. We presented the roadmap in Mural to key stakeholders and leaders to secure buy-in for the year’s initiatives. It also shaped our quarterly OKRs and served as a guide when new priorities surfaced, helping us evaluate pivots against what was already planned.
Each roadmap item included a ranking, description, business benefit, estimated dollar value (not shown here), and the blocks of work scheduled across the year. Every quarter, we revisited the roadmap—updating progress, flagging delays, and noting dependencies that could become obstacles. This iterative approach kept the team aligned, adaptable, and accountable.