As a Product Design Manager at Kroger, I led a team of designers across five products, focusing on aligning workflows, automating processes, and refining product strategy. The case study explores a redesign of Kroger’s pricing systems, which initially relied heavily on manual labor and outdated processes, aiming to modernize them through data automation and strategic design.
The current pricing process was fragmented and labor-intensive. Division pricing analysts manually gathered competitive data from stores weekly—often checking hundreds of prices via spreadsheets. This was followed by macro-based Excel analysis, manual price adjustments, and overnight batch processing in legacy systems. Despite Kroger’s scale, much of its $100B pricing operation still depended on repetitive manual work and disconnected tools.
The redesign sought to address four core opportunities for improvement:
Stakeholder trust and low design maturity were major hurdles. Many stakeholders had decades-long tenure at Kroger and while they had processes that worked, they left little room to scale without adding headcount. Building trust required a year of workshops, shadowing sessions, and usability testing to shift perceptions. Through consistent collaboration and visibility, the design team fostered openness toward more modern, user-centered processes.
The proposed future-state design centered on competitive intelligence and data management. It introduced:
The transformation cut analysts’ workload from 60 hours per week to just 2 hours, freeing time for strategic decision-making. Beyond efficiency, the redesign promised gains in pricing accuracy, user satisfaction, and profit margins. The next phase envisions a “human-in-the-loop” pricing model, where analysts intervene only when the system flags anomalies—bringing Kroger closer to a scalable, intelligent, and adaptive pricing system.