A customer pulls off the road, stops beside a pump, taps a card, watches the numbers climb and leaves. The whole exchange can be over before a song on the radio. For Rob Chumley, that abbreviated visit contains an unusually rich business problem. The customer has arrived with a job already in mind. The store has a narrow window to recognize it, make it easier and perhaps earn permission for the next interaction. Every extra tap matters. So does every irrelevant offer.
Chumley calls these transactions “missions.” It is a small change in vocabulary with a large consequence. A transaction is something recorded after it happens. A mission begins before the customer reaches the property. It carries a purpose, a time budget and a set of expectations. At a 2024 industry conference, he made the point through Murphy USA’s physical estate: roughly 750 kiosks, alongside small and large walk-in stores. Nobody approaches a tiny kiosk expecting a made-to-order burrito. The format has already told the customer what sort of trip this can be.
That sensitivity to context helps explain Chumley’s career. He did not begin as a technologist in a technology company. He earned an engineering degree from the Royal Military College of Canada, followed by an MBA at Dalhousie University, then spent 17 years with consumer-products manufacturers. His résumé crosses Procter & Gamble, Gillette, Coca-Cola and Kellogg’s. It is an education in brands, categories, supply systems and the hard arithmetic behind a shelf.
01 / Both sides of the net
Learning the shelf before redesigning the store
When Chumley later described his background to Murphy USA investors, he used a sports metaphor: he had “played both sides of the net.” Manufacturers know why a price moves, how trade funds work and which economics sit behind a promotion. Retailers experience the other half: whether a store team can execute the plan, whether the assortment makes sense in six feet of space and whether the customer notices at all.
He carried that perspective to 7-Eleven around 2010. By November 2011, he was leading a dedicated business and retail innovation function backed by chief executive Joe DePinto. The brief was broader than inventing products. His teams worked on the shopping experience, new store designs, a mobile connection with customers and services that could extend beyond the four walls. They tested delivery with Postmates, bill-payment options and digital key-making kiosks. A convenience-store network began to look less like a collection of shelves and more like a distributed platform: close to customers, open all night and replenished every day.
“What we’re really focusing on now is this transition from convenience, which is defined by the products, to a convenient store, which is defined by the solutions it provides.”Rob Chumley, discussing 7-Eleven’s innovation work in 2015
The language is revealing. “Convenience store” names an industry. “Convenient store” makes a promise. The first can be measured in square footage and assortment. The second must be judged in the life of a particular customer. Can this place solve the problem at the moment it appears?
02 / The filter
Three questions between an idea and a rollout
Corporate innovation can drift toward theater because possibility is easier to display than adoption. Chumley’s 7-Eleven team used a blunt filter. Is the idea desirable to the customer? Is it feasible for the business system, including franchisees and store associates? Is it viable over time for both the operator and the company? A proposal that fails any one of those tests is not ready, no matter how good the demonstration looks.
Desirable
Does it solve a problem the customer actually feels?
Feasible
Can the store, system and frontline execute it simply?
Viable
Does the value last for every party that must support it?
The approach gave the team room to explore while preserving an operator’s skepticism. It also supported a more unusual experiment. In 2013, Chumley and colleagues established 7-Ventures, a corporate venture arm designed to discover, partner with and invest in consumer-facing technologies. The store network itself became part of the pitch to founders: thousands of safe, lit, always-open locations and a system capable of daily delivery. The asset was not merely real estate. It was repeat contact.
By the time Chumley left 7-Eleven, the innovation operation had worked on store prototypes, an app used by millions and a loyalty system generating tens of millions of transactions. More important than any individual project was the institutional shape of the work: a small team with executive sponsorship, freedom from daily results and responsibility for moving viable experiments into the larger organization.
03 / The path to purchase
Finding growth in the customers who drive past
Murphy USA hired Chumley in September 2016 as senior vice president of marketing. His remit covered marketing and merchandising, with particular attention to loyalty, digital promotion and store operations. The business was familiar enough to use his retail muscles and different enough to require a fresh map. Many Murphy USA sites sit near Walmart supercenters. The company was built around low fuel prices, fast visits and formats smaller than the c-store industry’s expanding food halls.
In an investor presentation the next year, Chumley laid out what he called the path to purchase. Around the company’s 1,400 stores, he said, nearby Walmart supercenters were recording roughly eight million daily transactions while Murphy USA handled about 1.7 million fuel transactions. That left millions of people driving past. Among those who did stop for fuel, only a fraction entered the kiosk or store. The growth plan could therefore be expressed in three moves.
The framework is almost aggressively plain. That is its strength. It connects customer behavior to profit without pretending every format should do everything. A kiosk cannot win by impersonating a restaurant. It can win by understanding the fuel mission, presenting a relevant offer and making redemption painless. Chumley’s manufacturer experience mattered here too. Rather than treating vendor decisions as mysteries, he urged merchants to understand the economics on the other side and then choose their response.
Murphy Drive Rewards emerged from this period as the company’s loyalty platform. Over time, Chumley’s role widened. In June 2022, he became chief digital officer. A 2023 recruiting video makes his definition of digital transformation unusually concrete: create capabilities that serve customers better, simplify stores and grow the business profitably. He described loyalty programs with millions of users and roughly 500,000 daily loyalty transactions, then spoke about data scientists, engineers and marketers working across models, offers and platforms. Technology was not a separate digital storefront. It was a way to make the physical one more legible.
“Digital transformation at Murphy USA is about creating new and differentiated capabilities to better serve our customers, simplify our stores and profitably grow our business.”Rob Chumley, Murphy USA recruiting message
04 / Trust is infrastructure
The colleague with 19 questions
Strategies do not walk into stores by themselves. One of the few public stories about Chumley as a manager comes from Brian Brooks, a colleague who first met him during a 7-Eleven interview in 2011. Brooks was not looking to leave Speedway. His introductory presentation leaned on jokes and odd photographs rather than polished slides. Chumley hired him, in part because people he trusted believed Brooks could do the work.
Years after Chumley left 7-Eleven, he called again, this time about Murphy USA. Brooks initially declined. The move to El Dorado, Arkansas, did not fit the comfortable life he had built in north Texas. He eventually returned with 19 questions. Chumley went away, found the answers and kept the conversation open. Brooks joined. In an email, Chumley left him with a line he later placed where he could see it every workday: “Sometimes you just have to believe in the people that believe in you!”
It is a warmer version of the same operating logic. Transformation requires a sponsor. The person being asked to change roles, systems or habits needs evidence that the sponsor understands the risk. Chumley’s public frameworks put feasibility beside desirability for a reason. Frontline execution is not the final mile of strategy. It is one of the first conditions.
05 / The next useful second
Technology that disappears into the errand
Murphy USA now lists Chumley as senior vice president and chief technology and innovation officer. His responsibilities span Murphy USA and QuickChek, covering technology, innovation, digital transformation, loyalty, payments and customer experience. The portfolio is broader than the marketing role he entered a decade ago, but the organizing problem is recognizable. How does a large physical network learn without slowing down the people it serves?
The answer will not be a single app screen or store prototype. Murphy USA and QuickChek operate distinct formats with different customer promises. Payments need to vanish into the visit. Loyalty has to exchange real savings for attention. Analytics must improve decisions without creating extra work at the counter. The best result may feel uneventful: the right price appears, the offer makes sense, the pump works and the customer gets back on the road.
This is Chumley’s 90-second laboratory. It is not glamorous, and that is precisely why it matters. Ordinary errands are repeated often enough to expose every weak assumption. A clever idea meets a hurried customer, a constrained store and an unforgiving business model. If it remains desirable, feasible and viable after that encounter, it may have earned the right to scale.