Leslie LaCosta spent 31 years in retail — starting on a sales floor at 15 and becoming a store manager at 18 — before building the Project Management Office at Bed Bath & Beyond and later leading store operations and CX at Party City. In this episode, she and Matt trace a straight line between retail operations and regulated life sciences operations: both live and die on the same thing — getting people to actually do the process, not just agree with it in a meeting. Leslie talks about why transformation initiatives fail when they're stacked on top of someone's existing job, why she built her post-corporate career as a fractional operator ("I'm here for a good time, not a long time"), and why she thinks AI's real value isn't replacing the operator — it's clearing out the "science" so the "art" of operations can actually show up.
Leslie LaCosta is a fractional operations leader who embeds directly with client teams to fix broken processes and remove friction in customer experience, rather than handing over a deck and walking away. She spent 31 years in retail, working her way from a store-level associate to district manager to nearly 13 years at Bed Bath & Beyond corporate — where she organically built and ran the company's Project Management Office across roughly 1,500 stores — before spending over six years at Party City in store operations and customer experience. She holds a patent for point-of-sale coupon-recovery technology. She now runs her own consulting practice and posts short-form operations content that's built a following for calling out what most operators only say quietly in meetings.
Connect with Leslie on LinkedIn.
Note: Leslie mentioned her TikTok content directly in the episode, but we don't have a verified handle to link here — if you're listening, Leslie, send it our way and we'll get it added.
From the sales floor to the boardroom. Leslie describes going from part-time retail work at 15 to store manager at 18 to nearly three decades of climbing every level of retail operations without ever leaving the industry — and why that ground-level experience never left her, even years into corporate strategy roles.
Building the PMO — and seeing the cracks. When Bed Bath & Beyond hit a ceiling on store growth and started acquiring brands (Buy Buy Baby, Christmas Tree Shops, Harmon), leadership needed someone with enough internal credibility to run cross-functional initiatives and report straight to the C-suite. Leslie got the job organically — and the seat gave her an unfiltered view into leadership's thinking that eventually told her the company was headed for trouble.
Why stacking a transformation on someone's day job doesn't work. Leslie's core operating belief: if you're calling something a transformation, you need to bring in dedicated (often temporary) resources for it — not ask an SVP to run their business unit, lead the initiative, and project manage the cross-functional team, all as one job.
The fractional model, on purpose. Leslie built her post-corporate career around embedding temporarily, moving fast because she doesn't own the politics or the day-to-day, and leaving once the fix sticks — a deliberate contrast to being pulled into the org chart permanently.
Point of sale, coupons, and designing from a distance. Leslie tells the story of a Bed Bath & Beyond coupon bug that was refunding customers more than they'd paid — and why sitting between IT, finance, and the register (rather than just taking a requirement and building it) was the only way to catch it before it hit stores.
Standing behind the register. Every six to eight weeks, Leslie would pull the most disconnected corporate stakeholders out of their meetings and put them behind an actual register for an hour, working real customers. She'd found someone in charge of a process who'd never once seen it run. Her fix wasn't a training deck — it was making them stand there.
The light bulb, not the lecture. Leslie doesn't tell frontline staff what to do — she asks questions until they arrive at it themselves. She walks through how she gets buy-in on something as small as scanning a coupon by tracing the chain all the way to the employee's own bonus, because "everybody wants to know what's in it for me."
AI as a tool for separating the science from the art. Leslie frames operations as having both a black-and-white, executable "science" side and a harder-to-replicate "art" side — reading people, seeing the pattern, knowing what to say to whom. Her take: AI's value is taking the science off her plate so the art has more room to work, not replacing the art itself.
"We're too busy to get good." Both Matt and Leslie return to this as the excuse that quietly runs most operations teams — the two hours you don't have time to invest now costing five hours a week forever.
"I never forgot where I came from, because every single block built on the previous one." — Leslie LaCosta
"If you're really willing to call it a transformation, you need to bring in temporary resources to support it for a distinct amount of time, and then let them leave." — Leslie LaCosta
"I'm here for a good time, not a long time." — Leslie LaCosta
"You can't pressure test anything until you're standing in front of a customer who's in a rush." — Leslie LaCosta
"By the time they walked out of the store, they would usually go like, 'Holy shit, that's hard.'" — Leslie LaCosta
"Everybody wants to know what's in it for me." — Leslie LaCosta
"Everybody perceives operations as always science, because it's mostly black and white. But there is an art to it." — Leslie LaCosta
"If AI can take some of the workload of the science off of my plate... that to me is all it does is make me better and lets me shine on what I bring to the table." — Leslie LaCosta
"Miraculously, when it comes time for me to take PTO, somehow I was able to take five business days off, and it all still ran." — Leslie LaCosta
Anyone running or absorbing the fallout of a cross-functional transformation initiative; regulatory operations and RIM leaders who manage vendor relationships and system change control; operations and CX leaders trying to close the gap between headquarters intent and frontline reality; anyone deciding whether their next hire should be permanent or fractional; and anyone using AI to offload repeatable work so they can spend more time on judgment calls.