I led research and design for an enterprise personalisation platform at Loblaw Digital, the digital arm of Canada’s largest retailer. I co-defined the product vision with the lead PM and designed the first release for online grocery, grounded in campaign teams’ existing workflows.
First-launch result: +1.2% online grocery customer spend versus a control group.
Role
Senior Product Designer / sole designer
Timeline
Sep 2024 – May 2025
Team
2 PMs, 8 engineers, and 20+ stakeholders
Two broken experiences.
One shared problem.
I audited customer journeys across email, SMS, apps and websites, then interviewed stakeholders, shadowed campaign teams and reviewed past campaign plans.
The same pattern appeared on both sides: customer context stopped at business and channel boundaries, while teams repeated similar work in separate systems. This pointed towards a shared campaign foundation, with flexibility for how each business operated.
For customers
Context didn’t travel
A customer received personalised offers for vegan products. But tapping “Shop now” opened the grocery app on a homepage featuring meat. The email reflected their interests; the destination lost that context.
This illustrated a wider disconnect: customers shared one loyalty relationship across businesses, but each business saw only its own part of it.
For campaign teams
The same work,
repeated separately
Teams followed similar steps to define audiences, build campaigns and deliver content, but each business relied on separate data, segmentation and tools. Coordinating an experience across businesses meant working across those disconnected setups.
One direction. A practical first step.
I designed a future workflow where teams could start from a reusable template and bring audiences, timing and channels together in one journey canvas.
But operations teams still needed to create and review campaigns channel by channel. The first release had to support those responsibilities while establishing a structure that could grow towards the wider vision.
Three principles guided the design: plan around customer journeys, preserve context across channels, and share core capabilities while retaining local flexibility.
Turning the vision into a first release
01
Familiar workflows kept, campaign setup made modular
Operations teams needed to keep building channel-specific campaigns. Introducing the full journey canvas immediately would have required a bigger change to their workflow.
I retained a familiar starting point: create a campaign, then choose a channel. I made channel setup modular, so those parts could support the future journey builder.
02
Preserve today’s workflow, prepare for connected campaigns
Teams planned channel content independently, even within the same business. The enterprise’s ambition was to connect customer intelligence across businesses and enable more coordinated campaigns, but teams weren’t ready to plan that way yet.
I grouped multiple channels beneath one campaign while preserving channel-by-channel workflows. This structure was intended to familiarise teams with channels living together and support future cross-channel planning without rebuilding the navigation.
03
Reuse familiar building blocks
Stakeholders recognised the template-selection pattern and suggested extending it to other campaign elements.
I adapted that pattern for choosing content blocks in the grocery on-site flow. Teams could use a consistent selection interaction while working with different content.
The result
The platform’s first release focused on online grocery and established a reusable foundation for other lines of business to build on. It delivered measurable commercial value while creating a path towards more connected campaigns.
+1.2%
Increase in spend by online grocery customers exposed to personalisation, vs. a control group
Make future workflows
tangible earlier
Designing the live campaign overview exposed a gap in my research approach. Teams were used to setting up campaigns and leaving them to run, so asking what they would need to monitor in a new operating model produced little concrete direction.
Next time, I would bring examples from teams already working that way and realistic campaign prototypes into the conversation earlier. These would give people something concrete to react to and help reveal needs their current workflows didn’t expose.