Leader Spotlight: Viewing loyalty as a commitment to the customer, with Josh Engleka

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Josh Engleka is Senior Director, Product Management and UX at Lowe’s Companies. He started his career in sales and support at TCIM Services, a business process outsourcing company and later worked as a programmer at Alpine Data Systems and in IT at National Vendor Services. Josh joined Lowe’s nearly two decades ago, starting as a business analyst and working his way up the product management ladder, eventually leading the function and user experience (UX).

In our conversation, Josh talks about how his team at Lowe’s takes a unique perspective because they are all customers, as well as employees. He describes his approach for striving to understand customers’ shopping behavior, patterns, and journeys throughout the entire ecosystem, including in-store, online, and on mobile. Josh also shares how his team views loyalty as their commitment to the customer, not the other way around.

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Always starting with the customer

Many companies claim to be customer-obsessed, but in practice, it can be challenging to embody this principle and ensure it’s not just a buzzword. Can you talk about how you think about this concept at Lowe’s?

At Lowe’s, I lead product and UX, which means I think a lot about user experience. On the business owner side, I’m also responsible for several areas within Lowe’s. It really aligns with my overall passion. I’m the type of person who, when told something may not be possible, becomes hyper-focused. That’s always been my drive — I like to make the impossible possible.

Anyone can say that they work back from the customer. What separates our team at Lowe’s is that we don’t just say it, we live it. This is because we’re all customers. I’m a homeowner and I love the day-to-day grind of maintaining the house. I spend time every day living as a Lowe’s customer as well as thinking about the other customers in our ecosystem — associates, providers, vendors, etc.

I challenge the team with the mantra “no hands in pockets.” That means we spend time in the store, living and breathing all that our customers do, to get that perspective. This enables us to understand where the friction is and how we can remove it. Everything has to be integrated and connected. The way all the actors in our ecosystem work has to be consistent, repeatable, and scalable. It’s our job to connect and thread together the best of Lowe’s.

What have you found to be the most effective way to keep the customer front and center in your team’s work?

The most impactful way to hold this idea true is to always start with the customer. That’s how we understand and deliver on their desires and aspirations. This includes not only how they want to shop, but the moments they’re shopping for. When you think about both the inside and outside of a home, there are a lot of personal moments that occur. We want to help our customers succeed there, and we can’t do that unless we truly understand their needs.

We achieve this by doing a lot of research and spending time co-creating with our internal and external customers. I’ve had the opportunity over the years to put both the product and UX into action. I often find myself stepping back and going down multiple different scenarios to understand one perspective, and then running the same play from a different perspective. Finding overlaps helps me focus on what will help the customer and identify opportunities to iterate and to help achieve our business goals.

Mapping customer journeys throughout the ecosystem

Collecting feedback is key to remaining close to the customer. Could you walk us through your process for gathering and incorporating customer feedback into your UX design and product decisions?

I always say that feedback is a gift. It’s absolutely critical that we think about feedback in terms of the overall impact it’s going to have on the user experience. As a result, we have a lot of feedback loops in place.

One of the things that people have talked about for years is the double diamond process in UX. This is when you think about solution discovery and ongoing development by tackling problems that have been already defined within the organization. Typically, when we go through that process, we find ourselves asking, “Are we even looking at the right problems? Are we truly solving what’s going to help our customer, associate, or other user in our ecosystem?”

To improve our ability to drive outcomes, our teams at Lowe’s have transitioned to the triple diamond process. This means we’re putting problem discovery upfront to make sure that when we’re thinking of the problems, we’re looking at opportunities where we can be the most effective — both for the customer and our organization.

We’ve seen tremendous success from introducing the triple diamond process and shifting our time and focus to important problems. This includes everything from user research to living out the processes. That could be in the store, on the job site, or doing ride-alongs. Ultimately, we’re utilizing research, focus groups, and usability testing throughout the entire product development process and using feedback to ensure we have the right focus.

As you monitor the different feedback loops and spend time understanding the problem, what’s your process for ensuring you maintain a good omnichannel experience — through your stores, website, and app?

We always strive to understand customers’ shopping behavior, patterns, and journeys. We want to ensure that when we think about building an experience, we’re keeping the consumer in mind in terms of how they shop and browse and that we’re mapping that effectively.

We’ll map out our customer journeys, which include touch points online, in-store, and throughout the whole ecosystem. Then, we partner with other teams and work across our organization to be hyper-focused on specific areas. Our teams truly live through and understand those unique challenges day in and day out.

I’d describe our process as a golden thread that pulls everything together. We look at the context of how our associates are helping customers in-store. What are the customers’ unique needs at this particular step? Our job is to understand and uncover that so we can surface the right contact, consistently.

Many people talk about “bridging the gap” between in-store and digital experiences, but that truly is top of mind for our organization. Our goal is not to have the customer shop one particular way over another — it’s to understand their needs and provide unique, crafted solutions throughout their journey, no matter where they go through it. It’s a challenge, but it’s fun and exciting.

I can imagine it’s very complex, because a customer may visit or shop in multiple stores, depending on where they live or based on product availability. How do you factor that in?

There are so many steps and stages. We do our absolute best to try to help customers along the way. A customer could be doing a maintenance project or a full-on kitchen remodel. Those needs are vastly different. Some home projects are last minute, and others are planned and saved up for. We’re hyper-focused on how we can help our customers and their families experience Lowe’s in a way that aids them in achieving their goals.

Utilizing feedback to enable informed choices

What’s your approach to navigating the challenges of aligning your internal goals and strategies with evolving customer needs ?

We all live and breathe the Lowe’s experience. We frequently utilize Lowes.com, we use the app, we visit the stores, etc. We also all have our own internal biases, opinions, and thoughts, so when it comes to the experience we’re trying to build, all of these factors can easily get mixed in.

To ensure that we can meet the customer’s evolving needs, we always go back to our customer-centric culture. As more and more of the organization has truly adopted that, we’ve put more of our personal thoughts and biases aside. Receiving regular customer feedback and doing research and discovery helps too. We also leverage external resources to validate some of the things that we’re doing internally. Defining that upfront helps us understand what matters most in that context.

After gathering all that important customer feedback, how do you then prioritize initiatives?

Customer feedback definitely informs a lot of our product decisions. For example, how do we ensure that we have the right product fit? We can get feedback through things like surveys or focus groups. There’s a lot of other input coming in through social media and shared through internal groups as well.

What’s most important to remember is that the feedback you get depends a lot on what you ask and how you ask it. We try to ensure we’re removing bias from our questions. We’re also conscious of not using feedback to guide options that we’ve already decided we want to make happen. Instead, we try to utilize it in a way that enables us to make informed choices.

There were times when we spent initial efforts in problem discovery, only to find out that we were focused on something completely different than what our customers were asking for. They couldn’t always verbalize exactly what they wanted, but we were ultimately able to get to the root of it. We don’t always need to create something new — we can also try to make an existing product better.

Is there an example that you could share of a time when feedback differed based on the source?

Here at Lowe’s, we look at everything. If only one customer reported an issue, it’s easy to question if it’s actually a true problem or not. But, even if only one customer shared an issue, we’ll dive in to make sure it’s not impacting others. For example, someone shared this very specific example where they were unable to sign in. We looked into it to see if it was just one edge case, and we found that other people were experiencing the same thing, they were just describing it differently to us.

We see a lot of the same problems described in various ways, but it’s our commitment to make sure that we understand them and are addressing them promptly. And if there’s something more long-term, we work with the product teams to prioritize it for future roadmaps.

Viewing loyalty from the inside out

What’s your approach to leveraging digital experiences to enhance customer loyalty, and how do you measure that?

We see loyalty as our way to demonstrate our commitment to our customer, rather than the traditional flipped view of customers being loyal to our brand. We say, “How are we demonstrating and offering the best of Lowe’s?”

In my case, our digital experiences enable loyalty to help the customer. We want to find moments to provide personalized experiences or to unlock value. We’re always looking at ways to encourage that connectivity. It’s also exciting to see the reverse from our customers where they are loyal right back to us. We measure things like customer retention, satisfaction scores, and likelihood to recommend.

Given your perspective, what trends do you think will be significant for the ecommerce sector in the future, and how is Lowe’s preparing to leverage those trends in its product management practices?

I’m passionate about solving customers’ evolving needs. And I love digital technology, so I’m always working with my team to find ways to leverage that. What makes Lowe’s unique and interesting is that we start with the problems and try to forecast against those. How are they going to evolve over time? What’s available and what’s around the corner? We’re always trying to find that balance.

I think about AI as one of those disruptors that has changed the landscape for everyone. Generative AI can play a role here at Lowe’s in helping customers visualize the products in their space, inspire new ideas, connect to ideas they already have, etc. AI can help our customers simplify their activities, not only on-site but in-store. In our space, there is so much potential in being able to take a space, visualize it, and come up with multiple different solutions that really fit the customer’s needs.

Being able to do that in a way that takes the customer’s unique needs and interests into context is where the magic lies. There’s so much excitement around it. Some of the latest technologies felt like dreams before, but now they’re truly possible. We’re thrilled and eager to see how we can leverage them in the future.