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Home Depot's long-term growth strategy centered around capturing a larger share of the professional contractor market. With an estimated addressable market exceeding $500 billion, leadership established ambitious goals to improve Pro customer retention, increase spend, and strengthen relationships with high-value contractors. While Home Depot offered numerous tools supporting different parts of the Pro experience, the ecosystem remained fragmented. Sales representatives managed customer relationships through Salesforce, quoting occurred in separate systems, project management lived primarily in spreadsheets and email threads, and customers had limited visibility into their projects.
Pro Assist was created to unify these disconnected experiences into a single ecosystem that connected customers, sales associates, project management, financing, material procurement, and sales transactions.
As the UX Lead for Pro Assist, I was responsible for driving experience strategy, research, stakeholder alignment, design direction, executive presentations, mentorship, and long-term product vision across a highly visible enterprise initiative. By the end of 2025, the platform supported over $615M in sales, enabled more than $500M in project financing, reduced operational inefficiencies worth an estimated $58M annually, and became a cornerstone of Home Depot's Pro growth strategy.
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Hours spent reconciling project information
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Disconnected systems and workflows
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Manual material list creation & procurement
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Fragmented communication channels
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Limited project visibility across accounts
"I have to take little bits of what customers send me and make sense of it. Takes me a full day or more to get stuff in order."
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Weeks-long quote turnaround times
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Limited project transparency
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Delayed procurement decisions
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Poor visibility into deliveries and spend
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Heavy reliance on associate communication
"If I send a list of materials to my sales rep, I expect them to quote me asap. If they can't, I go where I can get what I need quickly."
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High costs of operational inefficiency
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Customer churn to faster competitors
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Reduced associate selling capacity
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Lower financing adoption
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Slower growth in the Pro segment
"We stand to lose Pro business if we can't streamline even the simplest parts of their everyday experience."
Given the scope and high-visibility of the problem, solving for it required careful but deliberate coordination across enterprise and online domains. My role was to lead experience strategy and design efforts to implement a solution that would capture and retain pro customer spend, while remaining aligned to associate workflows and business goals. It was estimated that this problem was costing Home Depot approximately $77 million annually, so in addition to solving for associate and customer pain points, the business set strategic goals to close that financial gap and return efficiency to the pro selling space.
Before designing solutions, our team needed to understand the complexity of the Pro workflow. Unlike many retail experiences, Pro customers often manage projects spanning months or years, involving hundreds or even thousands of materials, multiple stakeholders, financing requirements, and ongoing procurement needs.
Working closely with outside sales representatives, inside sales teams, and managed Pro customers, we mapped the full journey. Research included:
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Ride-along observations with outside sales representatives
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Virtual interviews
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Contextual inquiry
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Surveys
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Usability testing
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Longitudinal research sessions
By the time we launched our first pilot, we had completed approximately:
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600 research sessions
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300 associate participants
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80 stores
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19 states
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3 major sales regions
Note: Images are representative and do not contain real project information.
Throughout my tenure on the ProAssist team, I viewed my responsibility as far more than leading design. My role was to create alignment. Working within a balanced product team, I partnered daily with Product Management and Engineering to ensure customer needs, business priorities, and technical realities remained connected throughout the project.
Rather than presenting completed designs for approval, I involved my partners throughout the design process, from early discovery and hypothesis generation to usability testing, prioritization, and roadmap planning. This "three-legged stool" partnership created shared ownership of decisions and significantly reduced friction during delivery.
Growing Designers
I believe one of the responsibilities of senior leadership is creating opportunities for others to grow. While working on ProAssist, I mentored two junior designers through design reviews, pairing sessions, stakeholder meetings, workshop facilitation, systems thinking, and enterprise design practices. Both designers were later promoted into more senior positions. Their promotions remain one of the accomplishments I'm most proud of because they reflect the long-term impact of investing in people, not just products.
Creating Alignment at Scale
Because Pro Assist sat at the intersection of Enterprise UX, Online UX, Product, Engineering, Sales Operations, and Executive Leadership, alignment became one of my primary responsibilities. I regularly planned and facilitated workshops ranging from small working sessions to executive readouts, helping teams navigate competing priorities while maintaining focus on shared customer outcomes. When major disagreements emerged, such as the future direction of the design system, I focused on bringing stakeholders together around evidence rather than opinion, allowing teams to reach decisions supported by research, technical feasibility, and long-term sustainability.
Operating Beyond Design
My role increasingly extended beyond design execution. I helped establish research operations with Sales Operations, developed prioritization frameworks tied to OKRs, forecasted future design and technical debt, and worked alongside Product leadership to influence roadmap decisions. As ProAssist matured, my contribution shifted from designing individual features toward shaping how the organization approached product development itself.
Home Depot had identified a significant opportunity to increase market share within the professional contractor segment.
The challenge was not attracting Pro customers; it was retaining them.
Research revealed that managing large construction projects through Home Depot often required navigating a fragmented collection of tools, manual processes, spreadsheets, email chains, vendor communications, and disconnected systems. For many customers, obtaining quotes, managing materials, tracking deliveries, financing projects, and monitoring spend required significant effort and frequent interaction with sales representatives.
As project complexity increased, so did the operational burden. The result was slower project execution, increased associate workload, and lost business opportunities to competitors capable of delivering faster and more streamlined experiences.
My role extended well beyond interface design. As the UX lead embedded within a balanced product team, I was responsible for aligning customer needs, business objectives, and technical realities into a shared vision that could guide product development over multiple years.
My responsibilities included:
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Experience strategy
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Research planning and execution
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Persona development
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Hypothesis generation and prioritization
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Journey mapping
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Service blueprint creation
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Design direction
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Usability testing
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Feedback synthesis
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Stakeholder alignment workshops
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Design reviews
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Executive presentations
As the platform grew in scope, maintaining alignment became increasingly important. To guide decisions consistently across teams, we adopted three principles that influenced both design and delivery.
1. Seamlessness
The transition between phases of the journey should not be seen or felt by users (especially customers). Each phase of the journey should seamlessly flow into the next, creating a smooth experience.
We had to ensure that even though this was an enterprise solution, majority of its users (especially pro customers) would encounter the need to use it while in the field or on the job site.
2. Design For Mobile
Order Up successfully replaced the legacy systems it was designed to retire and became the primary selling platform used across Home Depot stores nationwide. Perhaps most importantly, the platform established a scalable foundation for future enhancements that would have been difficult or impossible within the legacy environment.
One of the most rewarding moments occurred when Pro Assist was placed directly into the hands of Home Depot's Pro Advisory Council. After years of research, design, testing, iteration, and alignment, customers finally experienced the platform firsthand. The response was overwhelmingly positive.
Feedback from professional contractors, sales organizations, and executive leadership reinforced that we had built something genuinely valuable. Features originating from Pro Assist, including AI-powered blueprint takeoff capabilities, were later referenced in executive communications and public discussions surrounding Home Depot's Pro growth strategy.
For me, the most meaningful outcome was seeing a product move beyond design reviews and development roadmaps to become a tool actively helping some of the largest builders and contractors in the industry manage their businesses more effectively.
One of the most important discoveries was not a usability issue, but an operational bottleneck. Sales reps were spending more than 12 hours every week manually reconciling information across systems, spreadsheets, emails, customer requests, and vendor communications. When scaled across the organization, this represented approximately 1.8 million hours annually and an estimated operational cost of $77.4 million. We recognized that the opportunity to solve this extended well beyond simply improving software so we framed it as an opportunity to reshape the journey of how pro customers and their complex projects are handled. This meant deep dives into all phases of the journey, from planning through order management.
3. Pro Retention
Give the customer a best-in-class experience that makes them choose Home Depot over all others when handling a complex project. Don't just do what the competition is doing... set the bar and do it better.
Rather than creating another standalone tool, we focused on creating a connected ecosystem. Three core platforms became the foundation of the experience:
Salesforce
Customer funnel and relationship management.
Pro Assist
Project management, material procurement, financing, collaboration, and project visibility.
Order Up
Quoting, purchasing, and transaction management.
This approach allowed us to leverage existing investments while creating a unified experience for both customers and associates.
One of the most significant pain points uncovered during research involved project material lists. Customers frequently submitted:
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Handwritten notes
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Spreadsheets
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PDFs
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Blueprint references
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Product descriptions
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Photos
Sales representatives then spent hours manually translating incomplete information into quote-ready material lists. To address this challenge, I led the design of an AI-powered material list builder that transformed this process. This solution included intelligent document parsing capabilities that analyzed uploaded files, matched materials against Home Depot inventory, and suggested relevant products when exact matches could not be identified... all in a matter of seconds.
As the Material List Builder AI began to gain traction, we identified an opportunity to address one of the most time-consuming activities in the project lifecycle: blueprint takeoffs.
Traditionally, contractors submitted architectural plans that required extensive manual review before material estimates could be generated. This process would typically take several days to complete. We expanded the Material List Builder AI solution into the blueprint takeoff experience and immediately transformed the entire process. Contractors could now upload complex project blueprints directly into Pro Assist. The system analyzed plans, generated material requirements, and produced comprehensive procurement lists that could be immediately transferred into Order Up for quoting and purchasing. What once required extensive manual interpretation could now be completed in minutes.
The impact was substantial. Time required to generate quotes from blueprint-based projects decreased by nearly 70%. For non-blueprint documentation workflows, quote generation improved by approximately 80%.
One of the most challenging aspects of Pro Assist wasn't design; it was alignment. This initiative required continuous collaboration across:
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Enterprise UX
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Online UX
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Product Management
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Engineering
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Sales Operations
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Business Leadership
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Executive Leadership
Maintaining a shared vision while supporting parallel development efforts introduced significant complexity. A notable example involved design system strategy. An executive directive initially called for the enterprise platform to visually mirror the customer-facing website experience. While the goal of consistency was understandable, I partnered with design and engineering leaders to demonstrate that experience consistency extends beyond visual styling.
Through workshops, executive readouts, and cross-functional alignment sessions, we guided stakeholders toward a more sustainable approach. When early implementation efforts began creating technical and design debt, I partnered with Product leadership to forecast long-term impacts and backlog growth. The resulting analysis helped drive an executive decision to revert to a proven enterprise design system strategy, ultimately saving an estimated six to nine months of future backlog effort and preserving our release timeline.
For me, the greatest challenge of building ProAssist was coordinating multiple organizations toward a shared outcome. Designing complex products is difficult... but aligning teams with different priorities, timelines, technical constraints, and business objectives is often far more complex. Success required constant communication, frequent alignment, executive partnership, and a willingness to adapt as new information emerged.
Looking back, I am most proud of how the team navigated organizational complexity without compromising the customer experience. Despite competing priorities and significant stakeholder pressure, we successfully launched on schedule while delivering meaningful value to both customers and the business.
Each of my tenured projects has reinforced the same lesson: Exceptional products are rarely the result of exceptional design alone. They emerge when research, product strategy, engineering, and business objectives operate as a unified system. Throughout my time leading both Order Up and ProAssist, I found my greatest impact wasn't simply creating better interfaces. Rather, it was helping teams align around better decisions. That philosophy continues to shape how I lead product organizations today.
Note: Images are representative and do not contain real project information.
Note: Images are representative and do not contain real project information.
This experience allowed pro customers to quickly create a material list in a way that didn't require them to rely on technical language, inventory terms, or delays between sales reps and vendors. We doubled down on the 'Seamlessness' design principle and gave pro customers the abilities to:
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Write up project details using natural language. For example, a Pro could say, "We're doing a primary bathroom remodel, replacing the double vanity with a more modern one, adding new recessed lighting, two new mirrors, and a new toilet. The customer wants black 12" by 18" tile for the floor, grey hexagon tile for the shower." Material List Builder AI would then determine what materials were needed to complete the project and build the list.
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Voice-to-text capability for hands-free list creation on the job site or while on the road
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Pasting an existing list from spreadsheets, texts, emails, notes apps or other documents
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Leverage one of Material List Builder AI's starter templates for common projects, like bathroom renovations, kitchen renovations, or deck installations
This capability quickly became one of the most celebrated features within the platform and was later highlighted as part of Home Depot's broader Pro strategy.
Read more about how this impacts pro customers here: https://ir.homedepot.com/news-releases/2026/01-26-2026-130100894
