In the last year of my time on the Store Environment Team at Lowe’s, our department inherited the added responsibility of signage intent, placement, and specifications of all in-store signage. Every been in a Lowe’s? There is a LOT of signage. Prior to this change, Marketing had owned this responsibility. However, they were not aware or equipped to contextualize signage among all the other in-store artifacts.

Along with my Sr. Director, I led the creation of an entirely new signage development process of the team. This required careful audit of the current working processes, interviews, and mapping of all owners and artifacts. We drafted dozens of iterations, putting each through a pressure test for adoption by stakeholders. It took time, and a lot of patience.

We eventually landed on a clean process and spent months “on the road” selling and introducing this new process across the enterprise. Because without adoption, our work would have been worthless.

The biggest irony? Because I helped design the system, I then became the face of signage intake and strategy for the Store Environment team, on top of my other responsibilities. That’s how you’re rewarded in corporate America.