Architecting McDonald’s design practice—rebuilding teams, restoring trust, delivering at scale and setting a foundation for global product innovation.

My role:

  • Staffed and managed a 13-person design team across product, brand, motion, and design systems

  • Evangelized the value of design across the product lifecycle through a series of seminars for 100+ product teams

  • Shaped the design org vision and roll-out program alongside senior stakeholders

  • Shaped a brand strategy vision to modernize the UI

  • Led hiring and onboarding of a new team to reset the design culture

  • Organized hackathons to simulate product design sprints for engineers and PMs to align on global delivery models

rebuilding trust amid chaos

McDonald’s design practice had grown outdated, fragmented by years of legacy work and siloed, waterfall processes. With new strategic goals on the horizon to build a modern, scalable in-house design capability, I partnered with cross-functional stakeholders to refresh the team, modernize design operations, and reintroduce a shared sense of purpose across product, brand, and systems.

stabilized the team, redesigned how design works, scaled the ops

  • Interviewed 20+ cross-functional stakeholders to assess team capabilities, identify mindset barriers, and surface gaps in collaboration and trust.

  • Audited Figma usage and gathered feedback to understand pain points across global teams

  • Identified quick wins like re-staffing and team reset, alongside longer-term initiatives such as backlog generation and scaling design operations.

  • Built a multi-phase roll-out plan to replace the legacy team with a new team of ICs aligned to distinct workstreams (mobile app, kiosk, restaurant ops)

  • Created an onboarding hub to document 7+ years of design knowledge, making institutional memory accessible to all

  • Introduced Jira to replace a cascading workflow, enabling real-time collaboration with engineering and product. This shift moved designers upstream, allowing them to contribute to problem definition rather than just execution, and helped the team adopt a more agile, iterative delivery model.

turned discovery into action

With a team of 13 designers, I led foundational discovery efforts that reframed the problem space and directly shaped the roadmap. In a culture where design had historically been production-forward, we championed a shift toward upstream engagement, demonstrating how asking better questions early on could unlock more strategic value.

  1. Design System audit and vision: Conducted a comprehensive audit across code, design files, and libraries to identify misalignments and define a single source of truth for scalable, global implementation.

  2. Global research into kiosk behaviors: Conducted foundational research across 32 markets to understand usage patterns of 130,000 kiosks, critical as the global share of kiosk usage mirrored U.S. drive-thru volume.

  3. “How Might We” workshops to reimagine loyalty journeys: Reframed loyalty through facilitated workshops, uncovering user needs that repositioned the program from transactional perks to relationship-building moments.

  4. Cross-functional journey missions: Guided 111 internal participants through 311 customer missions, synthesizing 131 recurring pain points into prioritized epics that seeded the product backlog

bridged vision and execution

To strengthen alignment with senior leadership at McDonald’s, I developed a quick-turn executive reel to complement our detailed strategic roadmap. After identifying a disconnect between leadership expectations and our team’s focus, I initiated a 1:1 to clarify goals. This led to a dual-track approach, reframing our work into two streams: executive visibility and roadmap execution, allowing us to meet both needs without compromising quality.

stronger partnership, deeper impact

  • Rebuilding credibility: One stakeholder noted it was “the first time I felt our design team was truly integrated into the way we work.”

  • Increase in TRR (Team Relationship Rating), from 2 to 7

  • Contract extension (~$5M)

  • Created an external case study to highlight how embedded teams accelerate impact by aligning design more closely with business and engineering.

what i learned

Product Design

  • No matter the scale of the brand and user base, staying grounded in core design principles is crucial to navigate the complexity and stay human-centered in the work.

  • Working across global markets reinforced how deeply context shapes how people interact with technology and validated the value of multicultural sensitivity in design.

Leadership

  • Momentum thrives when team members embrace change. Reassigning team members who struggle with change helps the team stay focused and forward-moving.

  • Structuring teams for multiplicative impact, not just output, is key to scaling both quality and influence.

case studies: