People Who Plan | Inside the Minds of Modern Operators

Kenzie Parton graduated from CU Boulder with a degree in applied math and civil engineering. Then she decided she didn't want to be an engineer. What followed was 13 years at Levi Strauss — and a masterclass in how to build a planning career that cuts across finance, operations, and global supply chain.Kenzie is now the VP of Global Planning at Kendo Brands, the LVMH-owned beauty company behind Fenty Beauty, Marc Jacobs Beauty, and others. But getting there required a leap: in the summer of 2020, mid-pandemic, she took a cold call that led her to leave one of the most iconic brands in the world to build a planning organization from scratch. The team she inherited had been through reorg after reorg. Turnover was high. The planning tool wasn't built for planning. And the expectation of what the planning function was even supposed to do needed to be reset from the ground up.What she built over the next three years — a new leadership team, a new mindset, and a new Anaplan implementation that automated months of manual re-forecasting work — is the kind of story that doesn't get told enough about what it actually takes to run a high-performing planning org.Kenzie is also an Atomic Advisor and recently completed a Berkeley certificate in AI Business Strategy. Her take on AI in planning is grounded and refreshingly honest: the technology is maturing fast, but forecast accuracy at 70% is still considered excellent, and the real unlock isn't better algorithms — it's connected data, financial consequence modeling, and planners who can translate numbers into business decisions.Her advice for early-career planners is just as sharp: curiosity is the skill that compounds. Understand the whole business, not just your slice of it. Break through silos before they become walls. And never lose sight of the fact that planners are making some of the biggest capital allocation decisions in the company — even when the work feels like it's happening at the SKU level.

Archie Durfee didn't plan to be a planner. He went to school for sport management, moved to Chicago with his girlfriend, couldn't find a job, and ended up temping at Radio Flyer answering calls about replacement wagon parts. Then a director asked if anyone wanted to stay after hours and pick orders in the warehouse. Archie raised his hand — and that decision set the course of his career.He is now the Senior Director of Sourcing and Supply Planning at Ro, the direct-to-consumer healthcare company. His current challenge: planning supply for the Wegovy pill — the first GLP-1 weight loss medication available in oral form — inside one of the most constraint-dense supply chains you'll find outside of aerospace. Think pharmacy licensing requirements across 50 states, inventory that can't be rebalanced once it's placed, expiration dating that has to align with 12-month patient subscription plans, and a product with sky-high demand and a very expensive unit cost. Welcome to pharma planning.Before Ro, Archie built his ops foundation at Radio Flyer — doing logistics, warehouse layout, WMS implementation, and eventually opening a European distribution center — before landing at Quip, the DTC oral care startup, where a VP handed him inventory planning because he "looked smart." He ran with it.Along the way, Archie became a founding member of Startups, the operator community that has quietly become one of the most trusted networks for supply chain and ops professionals. He describes it as rare: a place where people ask hard questions without competitive posturing, share real problems, and actually help each other.The conversation covers the limits of AI in high-growth startup forecasting, why persistence is the single most underrated trait in a planner, and how the real unlock for agentic AI in supply chain isn't better dashboards — it's automating the relentless follow-up work that planners spend half their lives doing.Topics Covered:- Planning GLP-1 medications at Ro: licensing networks, expiration dating, and non-transferable pharmacy inventory- Why short lead times in pharma are the silver lining that balances out everything else- Archie's origin story: Radio Flyer → Quip → Ro and the rotational learning mindset that got him there- Why persistence can't be taught — and how he uses AI as a "bulldog coach" to help his team ask better questions- The difference between managing a plan and managing the variables in the plan- Agentic AI and the future of supplier follow-up in supply chain- Where AI struggles in high-growth startup forecasting (and where it'll absolutely crush it)- The Startups operator community: what makes it work and why operators are uniquely willing to collaborate- Being an efficiency hawk at home: the one correct way to load a dishwasher

What do fine arts, Saks Fifth Avenue, Tesla, and global disaster relief have in common? Lyndsay Skeegan's career.Lyndsay is the Chief Operating Officer of ShelterBox USA, a global humanitarian organization that provides emergency shelter to families who have lost their homes to disasters and conflict. ShelterBox has supported over 3 million people across 25 years of operations — and Lyndsay oversees everything from finance and HR to data and analytics and sales operations. Before getting there, she built one of the most unconventional planning careers you'll ever hear about.She started in a contemporary art gallery in New York City. Then, determined to break into fashion, she did something most people wouldn't: she took a night and weekend job at Banana Republic to earn her shot at a buyer position, went back to the recruiter who'd turned her down, and got hired. From there she climbed through Saks Fifth Avenue, MoMA, Coach, and a series of luxury retail startups — mastering merchandise planning by borrowing textbooks, cold-asking colleagues for their favorite Excel formulas, and learning everything on the job.Then came Tesla. Lyndsay joined as part of the team building the direct-to-consumer planning and allocation function from the ground up. She describes that era the way a lot of Tesla alumni do: forged in fire, urgency as a daily operating mode, and a bond with teammates that has outlasted the company itself. After Tesla, she helped spin up a logistics and warehouse program at an EV startup, then took a deliberate sabbatical to pursue passion projects — launching a free financial education program for women and marginalized communities, developing a horse-based experiential leadership program, and running her jewelry company with 100% of proceeds going to charity.Now at ShelterBox, she's applying every tool in that toolkit — strategic planning processes, KPI infrastructure, AI experimentation, living SOPs — in service of the mission: no one without shelter.This conversation is a masterclass in what it looks like to be biased toward action, comfortable with chaos, and deeply committed to turning both into process.Topics Covered:- How Lyndsay broke into merchandise planning with zero retail experience- The career path from fine arts → Saks → MoMA → Coach → Tesla → nonprofit COO- What Tesla taught her about grit, urgency, and building teams under resource constraints- How she thinks about SOPs as living documents — not locked-in rules- ShelterBox USA's mission and how it responds to global disasters and conflict- Balancing urgency with a healthy, sustainable team culture- How the nonprofit sector is approaching AI adoption (and where it lags behind)- The mock disaster deployment she participated in just weeks into her role- Her horse-based leadership development program and why horses make great coaches

Aaron Hoag has been geared to say yes his entire career — and it started before he ever worked for a brand. He spent eight years at a freight forwarding startup watching scrappy founders steal business from companies ten times their size, and he learned early that "we can't do that" is almost never the right first answer.In this episode, Aaron walks through a career that moved from customs brokerage to Cost Plus World Market to some of the most recognizable names in beauty — goop, Kendo, and First Day — and what stays constant across all of it. The conversation gets into what makes beauty uniquely brutal to plan: when you're making formulated products instead of buying finished goods, a single SKU can cascade into a dozen planning streams across packaging components, raw materials, and contract manufacturers, all with different lead times. And that's before you add 50 shades of foundation.Aaron also makes the case for what a great S&OP meeting actually looks like — and it's not what most companies are running. The word he keeps coming back to is collaboration. Not the kind people claim to want, but the kind where people actually show up with open hands instead of defended turf.Topics covered:How eight years in freight forwarding built a planning foundation most ops leaders never getThe "geared to say yes" philosophy — and why it's a mindset, not a blank checkWhy beauty supply chains are among the most complex in consumer goodsBalancing tactical firefighting with building something sustainable, predictable, and repeatableWhat genuine S&OP collaboration looks like — and why it's rarer than it should beWhere AI fits into the future of inventory planning

Most planning teams run their S&OP once a month. They spend weeks preparing, pack everyone into a room, and walk out with a plan that's already starting to go stale. Michael Rossiter thinks there's a fundamentally better way — and in this episode, he and Jeremy break down exactly what that looks like.It starts with a distinction that sounds simple but changes everything: target, forecast, and plan are not the same thing. A target is what you want to happen. A forecast is what you think will happen. A plan is the honest reconciliation of both — and confusing the three is where most of the tension in S&OP meetings comes from.The bigger shift is cadence. When planning runs monthly, every meeting becomes high-stakes and political. When it runs daily — automatically, at the SKU level — the drama disappears. Everyone works off the same scoreboard, misses get caught early, and the conversation moves from "whose numbers are right" to "what do we do about it."Michael walks through how this plays out live in Atomic: drilling from a $12.6M quarterly target down to the individual SKU, channel, and week to see exactly where the business is tracking — and where it isn't.Topics covered:The critical difference between targets, forecasts, and plansWhy monthly S&OP creates politics — and how daily planning eliminates itHow to diagnose misses at the SKU level in real timeWhat to do when your operational plan diverges from your financial targetsHow to set 2026 goals that stay useful all year, not just in January

Chris Gerardy's career in supply chain started with a conversation he wasn't supposed to be having. He was 24 years old, no degree, managing a Famous Footwear store in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics — when the corporate allocation team came through, noticed he understood his store's inventory better than most planners they'd met, and offered him a job. He moved to Wisconsin two months later and never looked back.In this episode, Chris walks Michael and Jeremy through three decades of planning across some of the most recognizable brands in retail and consumer goods — Justice, Vera Bradley, Champion, Hanes, Paula's Choice, and more. The stories are wild. There's the COVID sweatpants shortage at Hanes, where demand flipped overnight from 1.4 tops per bottom to 4 bottoms per top. The Paula's Choice TikTok boom that nobody saw coming. The Vera Bradley pattern test in San Antonio that got ruined because collectors cleaned out the whole floor and listed it on eBay.And through all of it, Chris's advice is remarkably consistent: start in the weeds. Go down to the SKU lot, the size curve, the store-class-week level. That's where the real signal lives — and where most planning systems still fall short.Topics covered:How shelf life requirements by channel turn a simple forecast into a supply chain puzzleWhat COVID did to demand curves — and why pre-2020 history is basically useless in some categoriesWhy new product forecasting always relies on sales input (and why that's a feature, not a bug)The outlier principle: pay attention to what's on the clearance rackCareer advice for early-stage supply chain and planning professionals

Gina Jones McPherson didn't plan on being a planner. She started as a purchasing intern at a steel company, bounced through inside sales, and eventually found herself building S&OP processes from the ground up — first at a 10,000-person manufacturer, and then as the very first planner ever hired at Starface World.In this episode, Gina walks Michael through what it actually looks like to walk into a company that's been running on a scrappy Excel model and make it work — without breaking the trust of the people who built it. Spoiler: the first move isn't to overhaul the model. It's to establish the process.They also get into how Starface went from 5 retailers to 30+, what tariff chaos looks like from the inside of a fast-growing beauty brand, and why Gina thinks the biggest misconception about planning is that it's mostly math.It's not. The math is the easy part.Topics covered:How to step in as a company's first planner without burning bridgesBuilding S&OP from scratch at a high-growth DTC brandForecasting products you've never sold beforeNavigating tariff uncertainty through scenario planningWhy AI won't replace planners — but will make them way more valuable

Most planning teams are drowning in process debt and don't know it. They're rebuilding the same model every week, pulling data from eight different systems, sitting in S&OP meetings that produce consensus but not clarity — and there's never time to fix it because there's always a deadline to hit first. Nicole Monterroso has spent her career walking into exactly that situation and helping teams see their way out.Nicole is the Head of New Venture Operations at DVx Ventures, where she applies the principles of lean and operational excellence to the unique challenge of building startups from the ground up. Her background is in automotive manufacturing — where she discovered, during her Tesla days, that the way she instinctively approached problems actually had a name. A mentor connected her with the frameworks of lean operations and continuous improvement, and she's been applying them ever since — from the factory floor to the planning office.In this inaugural episode of People Who Plan, Nicole joins Atomic co-founder Michael Rossiter for a conversation about what operational excellence actually means for modern planning teams. The core insight: planning problems are almost never people problems. They're process problems. And the fix usually starts with one deceptively simple act — making the process visible.Value stream mapping, standard work, visual management, cycle time analysis — these aren't abstract manufacturing concepts. They're the tools Nicole uses to help any team, in any industry, see where their work is bloated, where the waste is hiding, and where a single hour of focused documentation can surface months of accumulated inefficiency. The best processes, she argues, are rigid enough to exist and flexible enough to countermeasure when things go sideways. Which, in operations, is always.This episode is a masterclass in how to think about the system you're planning in, not just the plan itself.Topics Covered:- What operational excellence actually is — and what ops is (hint: it's simpler than you think)- Why planning problems are almost always process problems, not people problems- Value stream mapping as a diagnostic tool: how one hour of documentation surfaces months of waste- The concept of "improvement via subtraction" — and why humans are good at adding steps but bad at removing them- Why process documentation needs to happen before you implement technology- Rigid yet flexible: how processes should be designed to handle real-world chaos- The sociological impact of visual management — what happens when the plan stops living in one person's spreadsheet- Warning signs of a wasteful planning system: no documentation, defensive "that's how we've always done it" culture, no metrics on workflow health- How lean principles from automotive manufacturing translate directly to CPG and startup planning environments- The connection between operational excellence, team culture, and respect for the people doing the work

Chad Brinton built operations at some of the fastest-growing DTC brands in the country — Made In Cookware and True Classic — and lived to tell the stories. The ones where a planning mistake almost bankrupted the business, only for a global pandemic to turn it into a windfall. The ones where the marketing team would go viral on a product you had zero inventory for. The ones where you bet the farm on building your own fulfillment center and somehow it pays off.

In this episode, Chad sits down with Michael Rossiter to break down what it actually takes to scale operations inside a high-growth startup: when to hire, how to lead a team when you're still a player-coach, why humans are wired to underestimate exponential growth, and where AI is starting to genuinely move the needle in ops.

Chad is now Co-Founder of Roger, a fulfillment intelligence platform built to catch and resolve the orders that slip through the cracks — before your customers have to ask.