A restaurant buyer's morning looks nothing like anyone who hasn't worked in one would imagine.
It's controlled chaos at best: prep lists, staff callouts, inventory gaps, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, a delivery that has to arrive on time or the lunch service falls apart. The last thing that person needs is an app that makes them work harder to get information they needed five minutes ago.
That was the problem. A $50B wholesale distributor had a mobile app with the right intentions, but the design and technology weren't in a place to deliver on its promise, and the people it was built for had largely stopped trusting it. The mission was to rebuild that trust, in a way that respected how little attention a buyer can give their phone on any given morning. The app served the receiving location first, with integrations into a driver experience planned as the next step, so the foundation had to work for both sides of the delivery.
Finding the mission inside the mission
We had two weeks of discovery to get it right. Two weeks to run real user research across multiple buyer types, align on product strategy, define the technical approach, and make sure all three pointed in the same direction. It was compressed, intense, and honestly one of my favorite phases of any project I've worked on.
The single most valuable moment for this app was the instant a buyer knew the truck was next. Not eventually arriving. Next.
That moment, “I'm the next stop on the route,” was when a buyer's full attention was available, when they needed real-time visibility and accurate arrival estimates, and when a perfectly timed notification could shift the experience from anxiety to confidence. Everything else followed from it: the notification strategy, the information architecture, the data requirements, and the technical infrastructure needed to make location tracking accurate and timely. All of it cascaded from one deeply human moment we found in discovery.
Your work is our work
I was on the client leadership team from day one, sitting alongside the Product and Tech leads as a design equal, not a downstream recipient of decisions already made. That positioning matters, not as a status thing, but because the work demands it. Design decisions at this level of complexity have technical implications. Technical decisions have experience implications. Treating them as separate tracks is how products end up with the right intentions and the wrong outcomes.
In one of our early alignment sessions, I'd just walked the Product and Tech groups through the latest design vision. I'd referenced the technical strategy throughout, not as a constraint but as the foundation the experience was built on. Someone noted, with some surprise, that I spoke about the tech work as much as the design work.
I said: your work is our work.
I swear I heard a click as everyone's thinking shifted into place. We understood in that moment that we were in this as one. That shared understanding is what I'm always working toward in a cross-functional room. It doesn't always happen that fast. When it does, you feel it.
Building in parallel, leading through difficulty
One of my early calls was about branding. The existing visual identity wasn't going to carry a world-class mobile experience, and I recognized that fast. We had a visual designer on the team, Nahin Shah, with a background in brand work, so I restructured our approach to run the rebrand and the core UX work in parallel rather than in sequence. The UX work prioritized foundational structure and interaction patterns, which bought the branding the time it needed to develop properly. When the two tracks converged, the experience felt cohesive rather than assembled.
Working with Nahin on that brand work was one of the highlights of my career, not only because of the output, though it was genuinely exciting, but because of what we built together. She is one of my favorite people and one of the most talented designers I've worked with. (Seriously, she's remarkable. Full credit below.)
The last stretch of the engagement brought a different kind of challenge: interpersonal friction with in-house designers that required difficult conversations, careful de-escalation, and steady leadership when the pressure was already high. It was a period of tough feedback in all directions, and of finding a path through conflict back toward the shared vision we'd set at the outset. It also required a hard strategic call. I shifted our design direction to align with the client's evolving internal design vision. Work we were proud of had to change. That's a difficult pill to swallow when you've invested deeply in a direction, but it was the right call. The client needed to feel confident in, and ownership of, their own product, and that mattered more than protecting our design decisions. Those moments are never the ones you want to have. They're always the ones that matter most.
What this project taught me
A delivery app isn't really about deliveries. It's about whether a restaurant buyer can trust that their morning isn't going to fall apart. That's what we were building: not a feature set, but a promise that the right information would arrive at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right form, to make someone's hardest hours a little more manageable.
It also taught me that the best cross-functional alignment doesn't come from process. It comes from a shared belief that the work belongs to everyone in the room. When that belief is real, a two-week discovery can move like six. When it isn't, no amount of structured collaboration will close the gap.