UX Strategy
Product Design
Responsive Redesign
Design Systems
Modernizing a Mission-Critical Enterprise Ordering Platform
Transforming a fragmented ordering and administration system into a more consistent, scalable platform, while protecting the customers, revenue, and operational workflows that depended on it.
The platform supported consumer ordering, customer management, reporting, and internal operations for more than 20 enterprise brands across North America. Over time, it processed more than 28 million orders representing over $6 billion in sales.
Modernizing a platform of this scale required more than a visual redesign. It required a product transformation strategy that could simplify the experience, reduce platform fragmentation, support different business models, and introduce change without disrupting day-to-day operations.
Platform at a Glance
28M+
Orders processed through the platform
$6B+
Sales supported across customer experiences
20+
Enterprise brands served across North America
2
Connected experiences: consumer ordering and enterprise administration
The platform processes 28M+ orders and supports $6B+ in sales across 20+ enterprise brands through two connected experiences.
The Product Challenge
Modernizing a platform without treating it as a blank slate
The platform had evolved over more than a decade in response to new customers, operational requirements, and business opportunities. That growth created valuable capabilities, but it also introduced significant complexity.
Features had been added at different times, often using different interaction patterns, navigation models, and technical approaches. Similar tasks behaved differently across modules. Some workflows required users to move between multiple tools, and customer-specific implementations had begun to diverge from the core product.
This created several connected problems:
- Customers needed extensive configuration and customization.
- Administrative workflows were difficult to learn and maintain.
- Consumer experiences varied across brands and devices.
- Product and engineering teams repeatedly solved similar interface problems.
- Each new feature increased the cost and risk of future change.
- Long-time users depended on familiar workflows, even when those workflows were inefficient.
The challenge was to modernize the platform without treating it as a blank-slate redesign. Existing customers still needed to operate their businesses, orders still needed to flow, and enterprise-specific requirements could not simply be removed.
The real product question: How could we create a more coherent and scalable platform without disrupting the businesses already running on it?
My Role
Product experience and transformation leadership
At the time, as Head of UX, I led the experience strategy for the transformation and worked across product management, engineering, quality assurance, customer-facing teams, and enterprise clients.
My responsibility extended beyond producing a new interface. I helped establish the product direction, identify where standardization would create the most value, and define how the organization could move from fragmented experiences toward a shared platform foundation.
- Defining the experience vision and transformation principles
- Connecting customer research with platform priorities
- Evaluating workflows across consumer and administrative products
- Identifying opportunities for consolidation and standardization
- Establishing a shared design system and reusable product patterns
- Partnering with engineering on implementation strategy
- Working with enterprise clients to understand customization requirements
- Leading designers and facilitating cross-functional decision-making
- Using prototypes, testing, analytics, and customer feedback to reduce delivery risk
The work required balancing immediate customer needs with the long-term health of the platform.
Product Direction
Simplify the core without removing enterprise flexibility
The transformation was guided by four product principles.
Design around complete workflows
The platform had traditionally been organized around features and modules. Users, however, experienced the product through tasks that often crossed those boundaries. We redesigned around complete journeys, such as configuring a location, managing an order, updating inventory, resolving a customer issue, or reviewing business performance.
Standardize what customers shared
Many customer implementations appeared different on the surface but relied on similar underlying workflows. We identified the capabilities that could become part of a common platform foundation, including navigation, permissions, forms, reporting patterns, notifications, and administrative controls.
Preserve flexibility where it created customer value
Enterprise customers needed to maintain their own brands, operational rules, promotions, menus, and organizational structures. Instead of supporting customization through one-off product variations, we moved toward configurable capabilities, reusable components, and a theming system.
Introduce change incrementally
A complete replacement would have created unnecessary operational and adoption risk. We prioritized high-value workflows, introduced improvements in stages, and used customer feedback and behavioral data to guide subsequent releases.
How I Approached the Transformation
From fragmented workflows to a shared platform foundation
Understand how the platform was actually being used
The transformation began with research across the platform’s user groups, including consumers, franchise operators, administrators, support teams, and internal stakeholders.
Interviews, workflow observation, surveys, interface audits, and product analytics helped us compare the intended experience with actual behavior.
We mapped the work users were trying to complete, where they encountered friction, and which workarounds had become part of their daily routines.
This revealed an important pattern: many of the largest usability problems did not belong to a single screen. They resulted from fragmented workflows, inconsistent product logic, and the need to move between systems.
That changed the scope of the initiative. Improving individual pages would not be enough. We needed to simplify the underlying product experience from beginning to end.
Establish a shared model for the platform
Before redesigning individual experiences, we created a clearer model for how the platform should work.
This included defining:
- Common navigation and information architecture
- Consistent interaction patterns
- Role-based access and visibility
- Shared terminology across modules
- Reusable administrative workflows
- Clearer relationships between global, brand, franchise, and location-level settings
- Boundaries between standardized capabilities and customer configuration
This shared model helped product, design, and engineering teams make decisions using the same principles.
It also prevented the redesign from becoming another collection of locally optimized screens.
Create a scalable design system
A shared design system became one of the foundations of the transformation.
It included reusable components, layout standards, interaction patterns, accessibility guidance, responsive behavior, and implementation documentation. A theming capability allowed enterprise customers to express their brand without creating entirely separate product experiences.
The design system was not treated as a standalone design project. It was connected directly to product delivery.
Shared components reduced repeated decisions, helped engineering teams implement experiences more consistently, and made it easier to improve multiple areas of the platform at once.
The result was a more scalable way to deliver product improvements while reducing the risk of new inconsistencies.
Redesign the consumer ordering experience
The consumer experience needed to make ordering faster and clearer while supporting the business models of different enterprise brands.
We simplified key parts of the journey, including:
- Location and restaurant discovery
- Menu navigation
- Product selection and customization
- Cart management
- Account creation and sign-in
- Promotions and loyalty
- Checkout and payment
- Order history and preference management
The experience was designed to work responsively across devices and to support brand-specific configurations without compromising the consistency of the core journey.
We also considered the commercial role of the experience. Promotions, recommendations, loyalty, and upsell opportunities needed to support growth without making ordering feel complicated or aggressive.
Rebuild the enterprise administration experience
The administration platform supported a much broader range of users and operational responsibilities.
Franchise operators, customer-support teams, corporate administrators, and internal staff needed different levels of information and control. Presenting every capability to every user had contributed to unnecessary complexity.
We introduced role-aware dashboards, clearer task organization, and more consistent workflows across areas such as:
- Order and exception management
- Menu and inventory administration
- Customer support
- Promotions and loyalty configuration
- Revenue and operational reporting
- Location management
- User access and permissions
- Notifications and activities requiring attention
Progressive disclosure helped keep advanced capabilities available without overwhelming users who did not need them.
Inline validation, contextual guidance, clearer status information, and more useful defaults helped reduce preventable errors and made complex tasks easier to complete.
Manage adoption and transformation risk
One of the most important product decisions was not to approach modernization as a single large release.
Long-time users had developed familiarity with the existing workflows. Even when an experience was objectively difficult, sudden changes could affect productivity and customer confidence.
We introduced improvements incrementally, using prototypes and usability testing before implementation. Releases were evaluated through customer feedback, support input, and usage analytics.
This approach allowed the team to:
- Validate high-risk changes before broad deployment
- Learn from real customer behavior
- Protect critical operational workflows
- Give users time to adapt
- Improve the product without interrupting ongoing business
The transformation became a managed product evolution rather than a disruptive replacement.
Important Product Decisions
Balancing competing priorities
Standardization vs. customization
The platform needed to serve different enterprise brands without becoming a collection of separate products. The decision was to standardize the underlying experience and provide configuration at defined points, including branding, promotions, permissions, content, and operational rules. This preserved customer flexibility while making the platform easier to maintain and evolve.
Modernization vs. continuity
A completely new experience could have appeared more modern, but it would also have increased training, adoption, and operational risk. We preserved familiar concepts where they continued to serve users and redesigned areas where complexity created meaningful friction.
Immediate requests vs. platform health
Individual customer requests could not be evaluated only by their short-term value. We considered whether each request represented a broader market need, could be supported through configuration, or would create additional product fragmentation. This helped the organization respond to customers while protecting the long-term integrity of the platform.
Outcome and Business Impact
From fragmented experiences to a coherent enterprise platform
The initiative transformed a collection of fragmented experiences into a more coherent enterprise platform.
The new product foundation improved the experience for consumers and administrators while giving product and engineering teams a more scalable way to deliver future capabilities.
What Changed Beyond the Interface
A stronger product foundation
The most important outcome was not a collection of redesigned screens. It was a stronger product foundation.
The organization gained a shared model for how the platform should behave, a reusable system for delivering consistent experiences, and a more disciplined way to evaluate customer-specific requirements.
This made it possible to improve the product faster while reducing the likelihood that each new capability would add another layer of fragmentation.
The transformation also demonstrated that enterprise modernization does not require choosing between innovation and stability. With the right product strategy, a company can improve a critical platform while continuing to support the customers and operations that depend on it.
What This Case Demonstrates
How I approach enterprise product leadership
See the system, not only the screen
Complex product problems often originate in fragmented workflows, platform decisions, and organizational boundaries. The interface is only where users experience the consequences.
Treat consistency as a business capability
Shared patterns improve usability, but they also reduce development effort, simplify onboarding, and make future product investments easier to scale.
Use constraints to shape better strategy
Enterprise requirements, legacy technology, customer commitments, and adoption risk are not reasons to avoid transformation. They are inputs into how the transformation should be designed.
Modernize without losing customer trust
The best transformation strategy is not necessarily the most dramatic. It is the one that creates meaningful progress while protecting the people and businesses already relying on the product.
Key Outcomes
- ✓ Supported a platform responsible for more than 28 million orders and over $6 billion in sales
- ✓ Created consistent experiences across more than 20 enterprise brands
- ✓ Reduced development iteration cycles by more than 30 percent
- ✓ Improved ordering conversion through clearer, more streamlined journeys
- ✓ Reduced onboarding and training requirements for administrative users
- ✓ Delivered responsive behavior across major consumer and administrative workflows
- ✓ Established reusable components and patterns that accelerated future product development
- ✓ Enabled customer branding and configuration without duplicating the core platform
- ✓ Introduced modernization without disrupting active customers or business operations
Modernizing Enterprise Products Without Disrupting the Business
A platform easier to use, easier to evolve, and ready to grow
Enterprise platforms rarely become complicated because of one poor decision. Complexity accumulates as products respond to new customers, workflows, technologies, and business priorities.
Successful modernization requires more than a new interface. It requires clear product principles, strong cross-functional alignment, a scalable platform foundation, and a deliberate approach to customer adoption.
That was the central challenge of this transformation: making a critical platform easier to use, easier to evolve, and better prepared for its next stage of growth.