Christine Kuei is Director of Product Management at Forever 21, a retail fashion company. She started her career in email marketing at Experian, and her natural curiosity about digital customer behavior propelled her transition into product management. Christine has since worked in a range of industries including B2B SaaS, ecommerce and fintech, and led product organizations at Chipotle and PetSmart before moving to Forever 21.
In our conversation, Christine shares her experience growing and optimizing omnichannel experiences at both PetSmart and Chipotle, as well as the challenges she faced during those initiatives. She also talks about the importance of digital analytics and how solving small friction points in the online experience may seem like minute changes, but actually result in a multiplier effect.
Having such a diverse working experience from those various companies greatly accelerated my product career. It’s not always an easy transition to product management, so I credit the strong foundation I built during my time at Experian. I worked alongside a very talented product and UX team who were ahead of the curve. They took a human-centered, user-centric philosophy, which was relatively new to product management. I learned how to be very data-focused with an outcome-driven mindset, lead with customer empathy, and understand how to fail fast.
As I transitioned into product leadership roles, I took this mindset of being customer-led and product-centric and instilled these philosophies into my team’s culture and working model.
When I joined both of these organizations, at the time, they were focused on getting product features out the door to support the growing digital demands of customers and stakeholders alike. One major opportunity area was being more disciplined around measuring outcome-based goals for product launches. Due to the focus on launching features to meet delivery dates, there was a lack of a unified, overarching goal or vision that the scrum teams were working toward. The teams were tasked with implementing a list of features without fully understanding the “what” and “why” behind the work. So, that was a problem I needed to solve — to unify a North Star vision across the product and technology organizations.
A pivotal part of these digital transformations is aligning product management, UX, and technology toward the organization’s shared vision and goals. I created strategic pillars that aligned with the key KPIs of our business, re-defined roles to meet elevated expectations and implemented operational process changes. Then, I had to evaluate success, and for these transformations, qualitative feedback was vital. This comes in the form of direct feedback because people will be impacted by their roles. It was important to take their feedback to heart.
At Chipotle, when I came up with the plan to elevate my team’s roles, I received some initial pushback from the scrum teams. The team members didn’t understand the “why” — they felt like the new “ways of working” would impact their efficiency. Specifically, they were concerned it would slow down velocity. So, I showed them a blueprint of the plan to make their processes more efficient with a defined RACI chart for each scrum team member within an updated product lifecycle process.
As expected, there was some on-ramping time during the first couple of sprints during the transition process, but then afterward, it became significantly better in terms of the end-to-end process. I created more efficiency in how they worked because I clearly outlined the role for each person and remapped the product lifecycle to mirror how it should work at that particular organization. Most importantly, the team felt much more empowered because they knew how they were adding value to the business, and what problems they were solving for the customers.
My vision for the product owner role was much more outcome-driven and required tighter collaboration with business stakeholders while still being the voice of the customer. I collaborated closely with other product leaders and we aligned on the areas we wanted to elevate for the product ownership role. That was the biggest culture driver that we wanted to instill but we knew we needed buy-in from our key partners.
When we shared the initial proposal for the updated roles, some of the technology leaders were initially apprehensive about our proposed changes because they did not want to disrupt the development process. We wanted to address their concerns and put together a presentation that included case studies, product best practices, and data points that supported our strategies. We led through influence and were able to gain the necessary alignment from our technology partners. Ultimately, what won them over was us promising that the overall feature qualities would improve and there would be a quantifiable ROI revenue impact tied to the work.
Being more strategically focused was the biggest change and they saw immediate improvements to the quality of the requirements, as well as the collaboration upstream with business partners. Bringing engineering and UX further up the funnel was the catalyst that enabled them to better partner together as a team and design the best solutions. Having these critical conversations during the initial discovery stages versus further down the development process was a key piece to the cultural shift.
When I was at PetSmart, growing the omnichannel market was a high priority. We had a very talented omnichannel team leading those efforts and we ended up beta launching Instacart at our Canadian stores, which we leveraged as our pilot test. We wanted to use our North American Canadian market first because the volume there is less than in the US — about 1,500 stores — so the risk level was therefore less too.
After we launched, we saw immediate success. There were early adoption rates across the board at the stores. We saw the most important metric outside of early adoption rates, which was average order value (AOV). It was significantly outperforming DoorDash — who was another vendor that they used and our benchmark — and we hit it out of the park.
After that, we knew we had to pull the trigger and launch across the US store locations. Since there are over 1,000 stores, we didn’t want to just launch it all at the same time. We wanted to scale, so we strategically selected pilot stores for our MVP domestic launch. We had a mix of stores that we chose, but the results were still the same — wildly successful. It was an amazing success story because omnichannel and retail to me should be highly prioritized. You’ve got to bridge that gap between brick-and-mortar and digital. Customers should be able to seamlessly purchase your products from any touchpoint and it’s your job to provide them with that access.
Also, this is a great example of how to successfully plan and strategize an iterative, testing approach before launching a wide-scale product. We had a hypothesis, we tested incrementally, and then we scaled and launched to the broader market based on our wins from iterating incrementally.
When I was at Chipotle, like many companies growing quickly, we launched features and needed to shift our focus onto the next project. Due to this, the teams were not able to invest more time on follow-up tracking or optimization of these features post-launch. But, any given feature had multiple areas to improve, all with bottom-line conversion yields.
One of the bigger organizational challenges was optimizing the online order flow, and it stemmed from a tactical perspective. We were trying to understand discrepancies between the analytics sources that we used. Aligning those sources was a real challenge, and we ended up picking and choosing parts of the data pieces that we felt most confident in accuracy-wise.
The other challenge we faced was prioritizing the work, which is not surprising given the sheer volume of the product backlog. A considerable portion of my team’s effort was driving marketing-related launches and activities. That had a lot of incremental value, but I had to make my cases in areas that weren’t being prioritized and were almost being de-emphasized. The sentiment was, “Why don’t we just build new and keep things business as usual.”
For example, our digital analytics tool flagged errors on our site that were losing us revenue. I honed in on that because not only were those potential loss conversions, but they were negatively impacting the customer experience. I wanted to create a more frictionless experience because our mobile app orders at the time represented over 60 percent of overall digital sales.
We looked closely at the app reviews. Our app users make up the majority of our online ordering base, so those reviews kept us abreast of that. We had biweekly syncs with the customer care team because they’re on the front lines and helped us understand the pain points. What are the 3–5 top complaints and hot issues that made people angry enough that we’d reimburse them?
Chipotle is a wildly successful company, even in these macroeconomic times. People love the brand and love the food, but if you don’t put the customer first, there will eventually be slow attrition. Maybe it’s not noticeable at first, but people always have options so you need to lead with the customer in mind first. Solving these friction points in the checkout process, even though they’re incremental changes, is a multiplier effect. If you continue to make these small incremental changes, the overall experience increases exponentially.
This was on the order nutritional screen in the app. Customers tend to look at the nutritional screen before they order, so we received very regular feedback via social media. Customers were saying that they could not easily view the nutritional information within the app — it just wasn’t accessible. They had to cross-reference their app orders with the information from our website which is a very cumbersome, time-consuming process. Many customers have specific dietary needs, so this made it difficult for them to stay aligned with their dietary goals.
To solve that problem, we embedded nutritional preferences directly into the app. This gave customers calorie information, as well as the ability to filter and save nutritional preferences as they built their orders. We saw a pretty good significant increase — almost double the digital percentage increase of usage in storing preferences — and received a lot of positive customer reviews about it.
2021 was a historically challenging job market because it was heavily skewed toward employees. One of my proudest accomplishments as a leader was hiring top talent during this really hyper-competitive recruiting market. I needed to create compelling offers and pull all compensation levers to compete with other large organizations. If you think about it, lots of companies were using that strategy and were throwing money at candidates. I didn’t want to get into a bidding war — I needed to find candidates who were obviously top talent but also were intrinsically motivated to work for me at Chipotle.
My success in recruiting top talent was selling our vision at Chipotle. I took a Ted Lasso approach and treated the candidates the same way I treated my direct team: with authenticity, empathy, and a dash of humor. During my conversations with top candidates, we had a two-way conversation. I was transparent about my leadership style and expectations of their roles and, like Ted Lasso, emphasized that as a leader, I focus on potential, not just performance. They’re not just taking on a job, but a career. I told them I would be their top advocate and invest in them on a personal and professional level.
For those who are intrinsically motivated, I knew that the messaging would resonate. We had the resources to invest in innovations like AI, personalization efforts, and automation. I told them, “Look, Chipotle is almost like a tech company. I know it’s a restaurant, but this is a really cool opportunity to be a blend — restaurant tech.” It truly was a blend of both worlds, because other tech companies relied heavily on funding. Chipotle was profitable on its own and leadership bought into AI and other new technology innovations.
At both PetSmart and Chipotle, I used this phrase a lot when I advocated for my digital transformation efforts: “What got us here won’t get us there.” I say that specifically when I push my new frameworks.
The status quo will not elevate your org in the long term. It will not elevate the experience for your customers or for your team. A large part of “what got us here won’t get us there” is redefining product roles to be more customer-centric and KPI-focused, and being accountable for the overall success of the product outcome. For digital transformations to be successful, there needs to be buy-in at the executive level and the product organization needs to have the backing from the top down. As product leaders, it’s on us to challenge the status quo and push our organization to that next aspirational level.
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