I was brought in to build a strategic UX function at Punchh. I built a team of UX designers, a visual designer, and a researcher, covering the most impactful areas of the product. After the acquisition I took on UX for PAR’s products as well, inheriting the two designers PAR had and bringing in consultants to cover the rest. I ultimately oversaw a team of twelve across the Punchh Loyalty Marketing Platform, the Punchh Mobile Loyalty & Ordering App Framework, Brink POS, PAR Payments and Services, and Data Central, PAR’s back office system.
The Unified Commerce Platform
The opportunity in the Punchh and PAR acquisition was bigger than integration. Integration would let the products pass data to each other. Unification meant one data model underneath all of them. That would let PAR build things no single product could do alone.
I led the effort to define and validate the strategy, and to get the Board to fund it. The question was which use cases were worth building, what customers would pay for them, and where PAR should invest first.
The Unified Commerce Platform vision, from the board deck I designed
Our CPTO brought in external consultants to run the market research. I directed their work, planned the research with them, and helped them run the sessions. We identified the candidate use cases, then met with Technology and Operations leaders at customers including Dairy Queen, Arby’s, and CAVA to walk through the use cases and rate their importance. We scoped the ones that mattered at several levels of depth and took those versions back to existing and new customers, to find out how far we’d have to go to solve each one properly. Then we surveyed 150+ Food & Beverage decisionmakers on what they were willing to pay for each use case.
The prioritized use cases
One use case scoped into three phases, and the questions we took back to customers
Results
The Board approved the strategy and funded the first phase at over $100,000
The strategy was detailed enough to act on, and became the foundation for prioritizing key projects across the org
Punchh Campaign Workflow
Marketers at restaurant brands use the Punchh Loyalty Marketing Platform to run their loyalty program: the offers and rewards their customers see in the app, the campaigns that bring people back, and the reporting on how it all performs.
Years of adding functionality for one customer after another had left the workflow sprawling. You had to know what kind of campaign you wanted before you could start building one, and it took several steps to get started. The steps didn’t match how marketers think about a campaign, and the settings weren’t grouped in any way that showed which ones related to which. Marketers couldn’t tell what to do, and Punchh covered the gap with training and support.
Campaign settings, before the redesign
Our only designer left as the work started, so I led the redesign myself until I could hire. I interviewed the Director of Training and the Director of Customer Success, because they spent more time with marketers than anyone else at Punchh and knew where the workflow was breaking down. From there I developed the marketer user journey, the use cases, and the task flow that broke the campaign apart into who, what, and when.
I ran the journey as a working session with the whole team, product, engineering, training, and customer success, to socialize the work and to pull in what people knew and had never written down. Then I validated the journey and the task flow with customers. We tested with customers as we designed. As I hired, designers took over the design and saw it through to release.
The marketer user journey
The task flow that broke the campaign into who, what, and when
Merlin, our AI capability, was the recommendation branch at every decision in the flow, and the plan was to upsell it to existing customers. Pilot testing made clear the recommendations weren’t good enough to sell. I raised that we should cancel it, and we did.
The campaign list1 / 3
Results
Increased customer engagement and satisfaction: CSAT 4+
Increased marketer efficiency: 90%+ usability task completion rate
Lowered training and support costs by 4–6 hours per user
No drop in usage for existing workflow features
Punchh Mobile Loyalty App
Punchh sold restaurant brands a white-label loyalty and ordering app. Smaller brands ran on it and larger ones paid agencies to build their own, integrating Punchh through APIs. The framework underneath the app was real: standards and shared functionality. The design on top of it was custom every time.
We rebuilt the app framework as a true white-label app, good enough that a brand who could afford an agency would want ours anyway. Every element was a component, and every component came in more than one layout. Brand styling changed the visual treatment on top of that. With minimum components and maximum flexibility, each brand could fully express itself.
Ordering screens from the framework, unstyled
Brand explorations for demonstration purposes only, neither app was built
Best in class was the bar, so I staffed for it and brought in a visual design consultant alongside a UX designer and a researcher. I coached the team, including our product manager and director of product, through developing the use cases so the design would cover what any brand and any of their guests would need. The designs were usability tested and came back intuitive and effective.
By the time I left, the framework was in detailed design, the approach was settled, and the team was running on it.