My Role

SVP, Customer Experience
I was hired to build and lead a new, integrated organization (Design, User Research, Product Management, Engineering, Site Ops) that was responsible for the full customer facing experience for +1.2M daily shoppers on Saks.com, its mobile apps, and the underlying e-commerce platforms that powered them. In addition, my group acted as the central integrator for initiatives developed in the new peer tech groups including Fulfillment Tech, Customer Service, and Central IT. In addition, my group was responsible for delivering new tools and merchandising capabilities for the Growth Marketing team.

The Setup

In 2021, Saks spun off its e-commerce business into a standalone company with a bold vision to build a modern, tech-driven retail engine that could carry the brand’s standard for the next 150 years. As a founding  tech leaders in the new company, my task was spread across 4 main tracks that had to be tackled in parallel:

1. Build a new tech/product organization, from scratch, including recruiting and hiring processes.

2. Separate all tech platforms, and assume full ownership from the parent company’s central tech group within the first 6 months.

3. Drive immediate revenue growth, in support of an aggressive IPO target for the following year.

4. Develop the vision, and begin implementation of the future technology platform, and evolution of the customer facing shopping experience.

The Work

1. Building a New Organization from Scratch: My first priority was building the recruiting infrastructure to attract top-tier talent, something Saks lacked internally. I brought in dedicated recruiting partners, establishing a strong pipeline of candidates and leaders from Apple, Google, and Amazon. That system became the foundation for hiring across all Saks tech groups, and within 12 months I had built a full team including:

• Product Management (8)

• UX Design (7)

• User Research (3)

• Engineering (60)

• ML/AI (7)

• Site Operations (8)

• Contractors (10)

2. Separation

As part of the spin-off, my team had six months to fully decouple and assume ownership of the e-commerce stack, migrating infrastructure, establishing CI/CD pipelines, and launching a new cloud-based DevOps and SRE environment before the holiday peak. We finished ahead of schedule, modernizing deployments, monitoring, and tooling to create a more scalable, resilient foundation for growth.

3. Stabilizing the Present and Driving Growth

When I arrived, Saks.com had just completed a two-year migration to a rigid, monolithic e-commerce platform and the site/app were riddled with latency issues, bugs, and technical debt. We immediately focused on stabilizing the site—fixing critical defects, improving performance, and adding missing core commerce features. In parallel, I introduced a structured intake and prioritization process to align initiatives from peer tech groups and marketing into a unified customer journey. This dual-track approach delivered rapid experience gains and helped Saks exceed aggressive growth targets ahead of IPO readiness.

4. Building the Future

The larger mission was to reimagine what a luxury shopping experience could be online, differentiating Saks not only from other retailers but from emerging modes of discovery on social media and AI-driven commerce.

To shape this vision, we conducted in-depth research (online and in-store surveys, more than 50 qualitative “shop-along” studies), and laid out a unified metrics framework). We also implemented Saks’ inaugural A/B-testing platform and experimentation process.

At the platform level, we began developing a modern, headless microservices based architecture that decoupled the front-end experience from the e-commerce platform. This gave us the flexibility to build custom web, mobile, and omni-channel applications, enabling faster iteration and innovation.

Results

• Built a world-class product and engineering organization from scratch.

• Directed 500+ product enhancements across search, checkout, personalization, and loyalty, driving a 120% lift in conversion amid 300% traffic growth.

• Contributed to 2X revenue growth over two years.

• Established Saks’ first A/B-testing infrastructure and in-house
  user-research team.

• Defined the long-term product vision and foundational architecture the company continues to build on today.

Looking Back

My time at Saks was one of the most defining chapters of my career, bridging my entrepreneurial roots with large-scale executive leadership. It was my first senior role inside a multi-billion-dollar organization, combining product vision with operational transformation at enterprise scale.

Together with an extraordinary team, we laid the architectural and product foundations that continue to shape Saks’ digital future. I chose to move on in 2023 once the core vision and groundwork were in place, leaving behind a strong base for the next phase of iteration and growth.

The New Saks

We re-imagined Saks as a place where customers come not just to shop, but to explore, be inspired, and entertained. Fusing content-driven discovery, curated collections, personalization, loyalty, and social interaction into a holistic shopping experience.

The Edit: A dedicated interactive, multimedia experience featuring exclusive content from Saks editorial team and our partners. The UX combined editorial articles, video, photo spreads, quizzes and polls into a single, shoppable feed.

Brand Storefronts: Inspired by the boutiques inside Saks’ flagship store, we collaborated with top luxury brands to craft elegant digital storefronts where each could showcase its story, collections, and editorial content, seamlessly integrated within the Saks aesthetic