14
Automation Opportunities Identified
2700+
Stores Supported
16
AI Agents Targeted
18
Team Processes Unified
Client
Kroger Technology
Role
Lead Service Designer
Methods & Disciplines
Tools Used
Designed the end-to-end rollout experience for a new POS system across 2,700 stores at Kroger. Connecting frontline workflows, backend systems, insights monitoring, and agentic AI support. A service-led systems strategy, not just a deployment.
Deploying POS systems at scale required coordinating dozens of disconnected steps across teams, often with unclear ownership and competing priorities. But the underlying problem wasn’t just complexity, it was the lack of continuity between deployment, monitoring, and support. Without shared visibility or automation, scaling to 2,700 stores in two years was unsustainable.
Conducted 6 weeks of discovery and research across Kroger stores, engineering teams, technology teams, and backstage support teams to understand the full store conversion process and identify opportunities for automation.
Built a service blueprint mapping store conversion actions, front-stage interactions, back-stage processes, and supporting systems across the full store conversion process.
Facilitated co-design workshops with multi-disciplinary engineering teams to surface back-stage insights and data challenges to drive strategy for monitoring and automation.
Mapped 16 agentic AI systems across key workflows. From order rollout automation management to triage, health and monitoring. Each with a distinct agentic AI agent tailored to its specific needs and constraints.
Prototyped designs for a rollout management platform to support planning, health and monitoring of the systems during rollout and ongoing operations of the new POS system.
Interviews conducted during discovery, helped to uncover the full store conversion process and identify opportunities for automation.
A snapshot of the store conversion journey map, showing a piece of the process of converting a store to the new POS system.
Key Findings
9
Distinct milestones mapped across the full store conversion process. From strategy and planning to post launch support and triage. Most problems clustered at the invisible handoffs.
37
Co-design workshops run with teams surfaced 37 back-stage friction points that engineering teams shared but couldn't articulate holistically.
14
Identified 14 immediate opportunities for automation across the full store conversion process. From cloud services setup, automated transaction processing, store configuration mapping, hardware implementation, and more. Most problems clustered at the invisible handoffs and manual processes.
To drive the broader strategy, I mapped the automation ecosystem and agentic AI systems to support the store conversion process.
Defining a vision of the future automated process and ecosystem could look like.
Mapping the agentic AI systems across the full store conversion process. From launch management to triage, health and monitoring.
Project personas and their jobs to be done across the rollout process.
Learnings drove me to work with engineering and operations to ideate and prototype a rollout control platform to support management of store conversion, health and monitoring of the systems during rollout and ongoing operations of the new POS system. These low fidelity prototypes were used to test assumptions and drive design decisions.
Design exploration of a monitoring system for managing the new POS rollout process.
Exploration of designs for a monitoring system for managing the new POS rollout process.
Click any image to open full-screen viewer
I established a shared, end-to-end view of the store conversion process, identifying automation opportunities and defining a future state vision with agentic AI. I drove the development of a rollout control platform for conversion management and system monitoring, enabling zero touch deployment optimizations and advancing AI driven monitoring, reducing rollout risk, improving speed to deploy, and supporting scalable, long term POS operations.
Next Project — USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN
CONVERGE
The Next Generation of the Essilor Pro Business Portal
Brian Pinkney
10+
Years leading teams
6+
Industry Awards Won
8
Business Sectors Served
20+
Countries & Markets
Sectors
IMAGINE.
CREATE.
EXPERIENCE.
I'm a design leader and experience strategist with 20+ years in product design, user experience, and strategy. Over that time I've worked with dozens of companies and brands across healthcare, retail, advertising, and innovation consulting, most recently leading experience work at Kroger, with prior roles at Cardinal Health and Grey. I'm a bit of a Swiss army knife. I design what people see, but I also design the systems behind it: the people, processes, and decisions that shape how an experience actually feels.
Right now I'm focused on the evolving relationship between humans and AI. I'm especially interested in Agentic Experience Design, moving past chatbots toward AI systems that act with intent, transparency, and real utility, with humans firmly in the driver's seat. I think a lot about the UX of delegation, the feedback loops that build trust between people and agents, and what 'Responsible AI' looks like when it's designed in from the start instead of bolted on at the end.
I like the unglamorous detail. The hand-off between teams that quietly breaks a customer's trust. The data model that decides what a frontline worker can actually see. The back-of-stage process that creates the experience a user never notices but always feels. I'm comfortable in a service blueprint, a stakeholder boardroom, a Figma file, or a terminal running Claude Code.
AI & Emerging Tech
- Agentic Experience Design
- UX for AI
- Responsible AI Frameworks
- AI Strategy (MIT / Wharton certified)
- Human-AI Interaction Patterns
Service Design
- Service Blueprinting
- Journey Mapping
- Ecosystem Mapping
- Co-design Facilitation
- Systems Thinking
Research & Strategy
- Discovery & User Research
- Contextual Inquiry
- Experience Strategy
- Data-Driven Design
- KPI & Metrics Strategy
Design & Craft
- UX / UI Design
- Interaction Design
- Figma (Advanced)
- Design Systems at Scale
- Rapid Prototyping
Build & Tooling
- Cursor
- Claude Code
- Tailwind CSS
- HTML / CSS / JavaScript
- Figma-to-Code Workflows
Leadership & Ops
- Product Design Leadership
- Team Management & Mentorship
- Workshop Facilitation (LUMA certified)
- Stakeholder Alignment
- Design Operations
Education & Recognition
BBA, Marketing — Ohio University
Human-Centered Design Practitioner — LUMA Institute
AI: Implications for Business Strategy — MIT Sloan School of Management
AI Strategy and Governance — University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School
AI for Product Management Specialization — Duke University
Agentic AI for Leadership — Virginia Tech