AI Product & Operations Leader · 25 years in retail operations
Chad Holdridge
I spent 25 years running grocery and retail operations, then crossed over to build the AI and retail technology those stores run on. At SymphonyAI I ship AI products and author the methodology, governance, and semantic-layer frameworks that make them credible and audit-defensible. I introduced Planogram Scan-in at Focal, and I redirected an AI-reset roadmap bet once the labor math behind it didn't hold up. Outside the day job: a B2B SaaS in production with its first customer live, and a personal multi-agent practice I use across my own projects.
Selected work
All projects →Retail AI & Shelf Intelligence
Enterprise grocery — the analytics methodology and product judgment behind CV-driven retail intelligence
B2B CPQ Sales SaaS
Multi-tenant configure-price-quote SaaS for industrial distribution — my own venture, built end-to-end
AI Operations & Orchestration Ecosystem
The hub-and-spoke multi-agent system I built and run my own work on — RAG, typed agents, and hook-enforced governance
Operations leadership
Before the AI work: 25 years running grocery and retail operations at scale. The foundation the product instinct is built on.
Peak P&L owned across a multi-store, matrixed regional organization.
People led at peak — 250 direct plus 350 dotted-line — for 5+ years across 20 departments.
New store openings led end to end.
Reached with Lean / continuous-improvement tools across 7 stores.
Leaders mentored into expanded responsibility.
Saved through redesigned, SOX-compliant inventory and cash-control programs.
How I work
Surface what customers need before they can articulate it. 3 years in customer success and solutions engineering, running field research, stakeholder interviews, and time-and-motion studies to find the problem behind the problem.
Design solutions balancing user needs, technical reality, and business goals. 68 documentation files covering KPIs, formulas, and business logic — because ‘make it better’ isn’t a spec.
Build consensus across engineering, design, and leadership to ship with confidence. ROI models, executive decks, and value narratives that drove adoption and shaped product roadmaps.
Direct cross-functional teams from concept through delivery, setting quality standards that compound. 25 years of operations leadership applied to product development.
What I bring to product
Conducted time & motion field studies across pilot stores, then built the automation that eliminated manual reporting entirely
Led a lost-sales / out-of-stock analytics methodology grounded in academic OOS research (Gruen & Corsten) — became a reusable internal standard across pilots
3 years in CS and solutions engineering — learned to identify what customers need when they can't articulate it, then translate into actionable specs
Aligned engineering, operations, and customer teams across competing priorities — automated executive reporting with trend analysis and AI-generated insights
Explain complex AI and data systems in non-technical terms to customers, executives, and cross-functional teams to drive adoption and shape roadmaps
Built dashboards, ETL pipelines, desktop apps, and SaaS platforms from scratch
68 documentation files covering KPIs, formulas, business logic, and API specifications
16 n8n workflows, 3x daily ETL pipelines, self-learning knowledge capture system