"There was no shared language for who Simplot's customers were — and no foundation for the kind of enterprise-wide transformation the One Simplot vision required."

Before any digital or operational change could happen at scale, Simplot needed a unified understanding of its customer base that was rigorous enough to be trusted and flexible enough to be actionable across very different business contexts. The deliverable wasn't a set of personas and journey maps. It was a shared organizational model — the prerequisite for every strategic decision that followed.

"The goal wasn't accurate personas. It was organizational ownership — a shared model that Simplot's divisions could use to make decisions independently long after the engagement ended."

I facilitated multiple working sessions with stakeholders across divisions using Miro for real-time co-creation, enabling teams from different business lines to contribute their institutional knowledge, challenge assumptions, and validate what the research was showing. The resulting ten personas ranged from small-scale independent growers to large corporate food manufacturing buyers — each built along a consistent analytical framework that included behavioral traits, pain points, marketing and working channels, values hierarchy, and a custom technology fluency scale running from Laggard to Innovative. That last dimension was particularly consequential: it gave Simplot a concrete, shared vocabulary for understanding not just who their customers were, but how ready each segment was to engage with digital tools and self-service infrastructure.

The personas were designed from the outset to drive four specific types of organizational decisions: marketing campaign targeting, technology implementation prioritization, website and content strategy, and customer-facing product development. Each persona was built to answer a single operational question — given what we know about this customer, what does Simplot need to do differently to serve them — and designed to be enterprise-wide in structure but specific enough in detail to remain useful at the division level. That balance took multiple rounds of iteration to achieve.

"By working through the journey with Simplot's people, the maps reflected both what the research showed and what the business understood about its own operations — producing artifacts that were immediately credible rather than documents that would sit on a shelf."

We mapped common pathways across customer types, identified the friction points where Simplot was losing trust or momentum, and surfaced intervention opportunities with the highest potential impact across segments. The workshop format was deliberate: a journey map co-created with the people who operate the business carries organizational weight that a consultant-produced document rarely does. Simplot's teams left the workshops with a shared view of their customer experience that they had built themselves — which meant they were prepared to act on it.