Decreased holiday schedule creation time from 4 weeks to 1 though cross functional collaboration and strategic user research to create impactful feature enhancements
USER WORKSHOPPING
FEATURE PRIORITIZATION
WIREFRAMING
DESKTOP APPLICATION
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
What is ScheduLinKR?
ScheduLinKR is Kroger's enterprise solution for managing store order schedules. These schedules determine when stores must place orders to ensure products arrive on time for customers, accounting for warehouse operations and transit time.
While schedules are mostly static, ScheduLinKR enables changes for exceptions like warehouse outages, promotional events, and peak holiday seasons.
THE OPPORTUNITY
THE OUTCOME
Reduced holiday scheduling time by 75% and improved data accuracy confidence to 89% through targeted feature enhancements.
USER WORKSHOP
Partnering with Schedulers to Uncover Hidden Workflow Complexity
I led collaborative workshops with schedulers, splitting participants into East and West Coast groups to account for regional differences in workflows. Ahead of each session, I asked schedulers to bring Excel files and examples of unique scheduling requests from the previous holiday season that had caused issues. During the workshops, we reviewed current scheduling workflows and tested assumptions with real examples, used scheduler-provided artifacts to fill gaps in our understanding and surfaced constraints and edge cases that were not visible in existing documentation
Excel helps meet separate goals
Excel played a larger role than expected, used not only to track schedule changes, but also to model warehouse labor scenarios and align cross-dock deliveries.
Changes extended beyond our original threshold
Adjusting poll and process times introduces complex edge cases, where order days and times can shift forward or backward by as much as a week, creating challenges for accuracy.
Flexibility is critical
Constraining schedule moves (e.g., to a catalog or shared poll time) introduced redundancy and significantly slowed schedulers’ workflows
The best thing you guys can get right is making this as flexible as possible. Every year, [it] seems like we get a request nobody ever asked for before.
STORE ORDER SCHEDULER, DALLAS
ROADMAPPING
Creating a Research Informed Roadmap
Using insights from our user workshop, I documented current-state workflows to surface gaps and pain points. I then facilitated a cross-functional working session with product management and engineering to review and align on these findings. Together, we prioritized opportunities using the MoSCoW framework and sequenced initiatives by quarter, balancing feasibility with the critical goal of preparing users ahead of the busy holiday season.
Strategic Feature Enhancements
Iteration Based on Enterprise Feedback
After reviewing design concepts with schedulers across the enterprise and partnering closely with engineering to align designs with backend data constraints, I iterated on the calendar view and change modals to address usability gaps uncovered during validation.
Week Out Deliveries
User Feedback
Schedulers often review schedules by poll week, even though the app is organized by delivery week, making it difficult to identify polls that occurred in prior weeks.
Design Update
Added lightweight visual cues to clarify poll timing:
A left-facing arrow to indicate polls from a previous week
Poll dates displayed alongside the icon for confirmation
Post Holiday Season Feedback
Following the holiday release, I distributed a survey to gather qualitative and quantitative data on schedulers' sentiment and experiences with their new tools while managing complex Thanksgiving and Christmas schedules.
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