Senior Director, Hospitality Technology Transformation

February 2024 - Current

Brought on to overhaul and modernize the brand’s technology strategy, positioning the business for aggressive domestic and international expansion. Led a team of 14 in implementing process improvements and innovative technology solutions that delivered over $2M in annual labor efficiencies, $1M in hard cost savings, and recovered $600K in previously uncollected revenue.

Achievements

• Defined and executed a future-focused product vision for a modern hospitality platform, transforming the full restaurant tech stack. Negotiated contracts that yielded $3.3M in additional savings over five years. Integrated both off-the-shelf and custom solutions into a seamless ecosystem for all stakeholders.
• Enhanced guest and employee experience with a revamped POS system (Toast), improving service speed, simplified checkout flows, and tipping UX improvements. Successfully scaled the solution to high-volume venues processing over $50M in annual sales with 400+ employees per site.
• Built and led a high-performance team from the ground up, overseeing the full technology lifecycle—from strategy and funding to rollout, change management, and training. Fostered a cultural shift within the brand toward embracing innovation and digital transformation.
• Expanded oversight to include legacy systems for hospitality operations (inventory, labor scheduling, tipping), building a connected ecosystem that boosted data accuracy and unlocked new operational capabilities through existing tools.
• Reengineered event processes across sales, execution, and reconciliation, eliminating system and procedural failure points. These changes led to $600K in annual revenue recovery and over $1M in labor savings.
• Actively engaged in customer advisory boards with strategic technology partners, helping shape solution roadmaps by providing
  insight on brand needs, product fit, and user experience improvements.

Vice President, Head of Product

August 2023 - February 2024

Brought in to represent client interests internally and shape the product direction of a rapidly growing startup. Led cross-product roadmap development, prioritized initiatives to unify solutions across clients, and guided strategic technology investments and partnerships. Educated internal teams on the procurement behaviors of enterprise clients to improve alignment and execution.

Achievements

• Developed user-centered product design practices, creating personas to inform solution development and better align with client needs. Shifted product definition earlier in the lifecycle, reducing rework, increasing story accuracy, and improving client satisfaction.
• Established and streamlined the full product development lifecycle, from intake through deployment. Implemented clear prioritization and sprint planning processes, which reduced internal context-switching, increased velocity, and accelerated client issue resolution.
• Strengthened client engagement and feedback loops, participating in roadmap reviews and collaborating closely with Sales and Customer Success to refine packaging, pricing, and market positioning—improving go-to-market focus and win rates.
• Forged strategic partnerships to enhance the platform with additional data sources and distribution capabilities. This expanded ingestion pipelines and introduced new feedback loops, offering a more complete view of restaurant performance and operational health.
• Led compliance efforts for CCPA, including updates to privacy policies, implementation of data deletion processes, and execution of “Do Not Sell” functionality.

Senior Director, Digital Ordering Experiences

March 2022 - Current

Achievements

• Led omnichannel e-commerce efforts, both internally developed branded channels and marketplace partnerships, increasing digital sales from zero to double digits in 3 years. 5 partner integrations for menu, order, & availability of restaurants to two different point of sale systems.
• Increased career advancement scores for all technology groups by 16 points in a single year.
• Rolled out a kiosk solution that resulted in double-digit ticket average improvement.
• Rebuilt ecommerce web & app experiences to use a new platform while improving conversion rates and experience reviews.

Responsibilities

• Led the effort to build and implement custom point of sale, kitchen display, kiosk, and resilient server systems, to fully overhaul our entire in-restaurant systems.
• Partnered with franchisees and operations team to design world-class user experiences for team members and customers to take & fulfill orders.
• Built a customer data science team to segment and target customers thru owned and partner channels, improving conversion, and increasing ticket.
• Built know-how of my peers at other Yum brands as they followed behind us in implementing many of these same solutions.
• Partnered with franchisees to align upon strategy and financial requirements to overhaul our entire technology stack.
• Built a team of 60+ high performing diverse contributors, a mix of FTEs and contractors, to build and maintain these solutions. Engineers, quality assurance, product owners, data scientists, data warehouse engineers, support teams, automation engineers, UX designers, and managers.

Director, Consumer & Data Technologies

January 2019 - March 2022

Achievements

• Led the effort in under a year to create a custom integration platform between 3rd party delivery services and our legacy point of sale.
• Led the effort to create a wholly internally developed kfc.com ordering site and KFC mobile ordering apps, in partnership with our Yum commerce platform team. Drove ticket average nearly 3x in-store transactions.
• Implemented a Martec stack consisting of CDP, CRM, analytics and multivariant testing solutions to create a 360 degree view of our customers, driving incremental transactions and higher tickets thru targeted marketing and improved customer experience.
• Improved data consolidation and delivery processes from daily to near real-time, improving data-led decision-making across the organization.
• Partnered with Taco Bell to co-develop a single kiosk solution that supports the needs of both brands.
• Represented KFC US in a 5-person Yum! project to define a global ecommerce strategy. Let the initial project that set the standard for a world-class ecommerce ordering website and apps.

Responsibilities

• Development and testing of Point of Sale, Kitchen, Payment, ecommerce, mobile apps, kiosk, & Business Intelligence solutions.
• Managed vendor partnerships for ecommerce, delivery, point of sale, payment and kitchen management.
• Led a combined team of around 45 people, located in Louisville, KY and India.
• Manged strategic offshore partnerships to meet business deliverables in areas where local resources were unavailable.
• Managed franchisee relationships to set and validate technology strategy for our restaurants.

Director, Development & Digital

September 2014 - January 2019

Achievements

• Transitioned away from a team of 60% contract resources to save $2MM over 5 years, while halving defects and increasing throughput.
• Shrunk cycle time from 26 weeks for back office and 2 years for POS, down to two week sprints.
• Saved 30MM hours of manager labor per year by streamlining start and end of day processes.
• Transitioned away from legacy back office and above restaurant management solutions written in VB6 to modern .Net/C# solution, resulting in a 66% reduction in the time required to do national data updates for 4,000 locations.

Responsibilities

• Development and testing of Point of Sale, Payment, Back Office & Above Store applications for 4,000 locations.
• Led a combined team of around 20 people, located in Louisville, KY and India.

Senior Director, Digital Technology, Innovation & Integration

August 2012 - September 2014

Accomplishments

• Defined a mobile app strategy that doubled the conversion rate for digital ordering through those channels
• Primary author of the DTII department charter and internal innovation process
• Built relationships with vendors to leverage their innovation strategies within our organization
• Built a partnership with Google Hands Free payment solution team to become a launch partner for northern California restaurants
• Initiated partnership discussions with Venmo for Payshare initiative
• Led exploration and RoI evaluations on new technologies such as voice assisted ordering and mobile payment alternatives

Responsibilities

• Defining company strategy for how our stores, franchisees, corporate teams and customers would interact with the company via mobile devices
• Defining company strategy for how we collect and analyze metric and machine data from our eCommerce and point of sale applications
• Defining company strategy for eCommerce, card present and mobile payments with an emphasis on planning for EMV liability shift and tokenization

Senior Manager, Business Solutions

January 2007 - August 2012

Accomplishments

• Formed an internal Business Analyst Roundtable to standardize practices and training for all business analysts in the Information Systems division
• Lead an effort to implement an automated testing tool that decreased regression testing from days to hours
• Managed requirements and created functional design for a fraud enhancement solution that decreased losses due to accepting bad checks by 90%
• Managed requirements and created functional design to add a new order mode that decreased the number of keystrokes required to take an order by over 60%
• Managed requirements and created functional design to allow store personnel to automate the update and cancel of orders placed with the online ordering system which reduced call volume to the online support team by 3,000 calls per week
• Performed a detailed gap analysis on three point of sale and two back office applications during the selection phase for the next generation restaurant management system project
• Managed requirements and created functional design for the first in-store graphical applications in company history
• Managed the data change process to achieve over 99% first time accuracy rating for changes to system settings
• Primary UX designer and requirements manager for a ground-up point of sale reimplementation
• Demonstrated numerous technology solutions to executive leadership, franchisees and the board of directors

Responsibilities

• Managed a team of 35+ Business Analysts & Quality Assurance professionals responsible for over 3,000 restaurant locations and our eCommerce platform
• Managed the process to create an instore test network that mimicked the interaction between store systems and above store systems
• Managed the elicitation process for all aspects of the internally developed, proprietary restaurant management and eCommerce systems
• Facilitated the creation and care of multiple new test labs for legacy and next generation restaurant management systems
• Managed relationships with third party vendors who provided card and check processing services to store locations
• Supported over 600 franchisee groups in multiple countries and all 50 states
• Created and presented continuing education for all business analysts in the Information Systems division
• Responsible for hiring, promotion and performance reviews for analysts in the Business Solutions department
• Managed departmental budgets for multiple teams and vendors

Senior Consultant - Siebel Practice

May 2006 - November 2006

Accomplishments

• Created a roadmap for a major financial services company to standardize their multiple processes and systems into a single process and system instance for all business units.
• Siebel 7.7 Certified Business Analyst

Responsibilities

• Studied Siebel 7.8 and 8.0 releases in depth, with emphasis in Field Service, Call Center and Order Management functions
• Performed high level requirements gathering for clients in the Financial, High Tech and Manufacturing industries
• Provided process and support to Sales Teams:
• Advised sales representatives on application strengths
• Helped customers determine their weaknesses and what process or system changes could improve their corporation
• Contributed suggested phases and timelines for customer implementation blueprint documents

Analyst Team Lead

January 2002 - May 2006

Accomplishments

• Decreased large contract entry time from 4 hours to 1 hour
• Led initiative to digitize customer documentation for record retention
• Reduced 20 country specific systems to a single, global instance
• Created a single, unified global business process for management of extended warranties
  Responsibilities
• Lead business areas in eliciting and defining world-wide requirements and business processes
• Managed testing activities for system-designed solutions and business processes
• Acted as the liaison between technical personnel, solution design teams and business representatives during solution design and implementation phases
• Implemented process changes and software solutions globally
• Created functional designs for system integrations
• Helped to formulate headcount projections before, during and post system migrations
• Elicited requirements and created functional designs for management and tactical reports
• Lead a team of testers in validating new business processes against a newly developed system