Transforming the Content Authorship Process at Kroger

Background

Kroger's digital experience runs on timely, accurate, engaging content for products, categories, and promotions across web and native. The AMP Content Authorship platform is the backbone of that process. Before 2024 the workflow was fragmented and manual, with no single source of truth, and publishing at scale was slow.

Challenge

The workflow spanned multiple tools and handoffs. That created bottlenecks and plenty of chances for errors. Planning cycles were rigid, so responding to the market was hard. Each banner in the Kroger family of stores publishes its own content, so variants multiplied across banners and modalities. Teams needed fewer redundant steps in asset creation and approval, and better alignment between upstream orchestration and downstream publishing.

Approach

In 2024 I led an effort to map the value stream of content authorship using Lean methods. Value stream mapping showed the flow from merchandising plan to live display and exposed the waste and bottlenecks. A SIPOC analysis defined suppliers, inputs, processes, outputs, and customers, which cleared up roles and dependencies. Service blueprinting captured front-stage and back-stage activity so we could spot risks and opportunities.

Together they gave us a current-state view and pointed toward a future-state design for a more automated platform.

Key Actions

We pursued a three-phase roadmap: standardize, optimize, automate. Early opportunities included integrating MX tool APIs for pricing and promotions, building ETL data pipelines for a single source of truth, adding a Digital Asset Management system for creative assets, simplifying Figma-to-JSON workflows to cut handoffs and errors, and adding CMS task integration for automated ticketing and deployment.

We also pushed to move from a push-based content cadence to a pull-based, on-demand one. It responds faster and stays more relevant.

Results

Fewer redundant steps and manual interventions sped up time to market for content updates. The future-state blueprint informs build vs. buy decisions for automation and orchestration tooling. CX, DX, and Site Production teams now share a roadmap for improving content authorship.

Impact

The groundwork for automation is in place. Fewer variants make it easier to scale, and better personalization and adaptive UI improve the customer experience.