In 2021 Apple faced a serious problem. After buying a particular iMac desktop, people were shipping back the keyboards by the thousands. Apart from the bad will, it caused a significant stocking problem: any boards in transit were of course out of inventory, yet the company had to maintain high levels on all of them to execute their touted claim of shipping promptly.

My job—solve this problem by creating a fool-proof selection process that alerted people to all their options. And there were many: the computer and its keyboard came in 7 colors, there were 3 types (with numeric keypad, without, and yes/no on the popular Touch ID feature.) Then multiply by the 28 languages offered. In short, I had to present almost 400 (392, actually) SKUs in a way that felt simple, not overwhelming, and even maybe fun. It took a few months. I worked with programmers and designers to build the step-by-step customer purchase journey; the engineers tested it; and it went live on Apple’s site the week I’d finished.