Defining a North Star for an Enterprise Platform
In 2022, Square acquired GoParrot to integrate its Franchise Suite into a payments ecosystem not originally built for enterprise F&B. A year in, the product lacked a long-term North Star, while competitors like Toast and Olo were widening the gap in the enterprise segment.
The problem
Leadership needed a clear answer: what are we building for enterprise sellers, for whom, and in what order? There was no shortage of opinions. Four different teams had roadmaps. Sales had a wishlist. Engineering had tech debt.
The product had grown reactively, adding features without a unifying model for how enterprise clients actually operate at scale. My job was to give the product a north star it didn't have.
My approach
Before touching Figma, I spent weeks synthesizing market research, customer interviews, sales feedback, five team roadmaps, product audit, and competitive analysis (Toast, Olo, and HungerRush).
The breakthrough came from reframing the core question: Instead of "What features are we missing?", I asked "Where does the architecture break at scale?"
A restaurant with one location has linear relationships: one or two menus, one team, one set of settings. At 20+ locations, those relationships multiply non-linearly.
Without structural scalability patterns, every new feature would inevitably fail. This shift moved the project from a "feature list" to a "structural model" for enterprise complexity.
Instead of "What features are we missing?", I asked "Where does the architecture break at scale?"
What I built
I led a cross-team design initiative to build a scalable vision, focusing on core pillars, including:
- Menu management: A hierarchical model for brand, regional, and local publishing.
- Location management: Group-based controls to manage clusters of locations as units, not individual entries.
- Reports & AI insights: Cross-location rollup views with anomaly detection, replacing location-by-location switching.
- Permissions: A layered RBAC model built for complex organizational delegation.
Deliverables included high-fidelity UI and prototypes with pattern annotations.
What made this hard
This wasn't a standard design brief. I had to operate without a PM counterpart, defining the problem, earning stakeholder buy-in, and crafting the solution. Every design decision had to be bulletproof: a pattern that holds at 500+ locations, not just 20.
Impact
I presented the final vision to leadership alongside a phased roadmap, prioritizing key surfaces for development.
➀ The vision helped unblock several stalled initiatives
➁ Location groups received funding
➂ Enterprise menus moved forward
➃ Four teams gained a shared language and direction