Building a 0→1 ML-powered product
Petco Love Lost
Petco Love, Petco’s non-profit organization, created Petco Love Lost to help reunite missing pets using machine learning and facial recognition technology. Petco Love Lost is now the largest lost and found pet database in the country, with more than 250K+ pet reunions and 3K animal welfare partners.
Anthem Award Winner: Best Use of Technology
Head of Product: Aaron Klein
Digital Product Manager: Jessica Remitz
Copywriter: Ben Laun
Product Designer: Abbey Price
My Role
I led the product development of Petco Love Lost from concept through launch, translating an ambitious 0→1 vision into a scalable product strategy, roadmap, and customer experience. My role spanned product strategy, customer research, requirements, UX, analytics, and cross-functional leadership. I:
Defined the product vision, roadmap, requirements, and success metrics in partnership with stakeholders and engineering
Led customer discovery and research to understand how pet parents and animal welfare organizations search for and reunite lost pets
Translated research and user feedback into product priorities and an evolving experience
Partnered with design and engineering to develop and launch the platform, including its machine-learning-powered pet matching experience
Established feedback loops and user testing practices to continuously validate and improve the product
Coordinated cross-functional teams and stakeholders through planning, development, testing, and launch
Used product analytics and customer insights to prioritize improvements and guide the product's evolution after launch
The result was a product that could connect pet parents, animal welfare organizations, and lost and found pets at national scale—while creating a foundation for continued experimentation and growth.
The Problem
How can we improve the site experience to reunite more pets?
Early iterations of Petco Love Lost posed several challenges, including:
Usability and accessibility issues
Slow site performance
Roadblocks in the user journey preventing pet reunions
Additionally, the site was not optimized for mobile, despite the fact that a vast majority of the users are on mobile devices.
Given that pets get lost and found outside, we knew the experience needed to be mobile-first, fast and easy to use.
The Goal
Our first step was to distill the primary functions and goals of the project:
Simplify how users report a lost or found pet
Improve the search experience
Connect users to shelters and each other to facilitate more pet reunions
Streamline the tool for shelter and rescue partners (whose animals in care comprise the majority of the searchable pet database)
Working wireframes with blue sky “report a pet” flow
The Outcome
Make Petco Love Lost the central database for reporting and searching for missing pets.
The newly designed Petco Love Lost launched in February 2024. Post-launch, the product roadmap includes:
Feature enhancements, including social media platform integrations
Pet alert and photo match notifications
Improved search experiences
Metrics to Date
250K+ pet reunions
500K+ searchable pets
3K+ animal welfare partners
96% of users who have taken a reunion survey recommend Petco Love Lost