Case Study

Pizza Hut Digital · Product Designer · 2025-Present

B2C | Product-discovery

Providing clarity to facilitate global business efficiency

TL:DR

  • Business intelligence

  • Senior stakeholder management

  • Experience and feature scoping

  • Defining net new functionality

  • Product requirement documentation creation

My role in the project:

  • Market analysis
    Research and insights
    Experience auditing
    Workshop facilitation
    Requirement gathering
    Scoping and definition
    Creating test plans
    PRD creation

  • Miro
    Platform documentation
    Figma prototyping
    Design-System
    UserTesting.com

Discovery Goal:

Reduce project timelines through clear scoping;
Ensure that experiences are globally consistent;
Identify new key features for the platform.

The Reality

Project timelines were bloated due to requirement-gathering being performed by individual markets before implementation. This fragmented approach led to inconsistent user experiences and resulted in a stagnant feature backlog that failed to address broader global market needs.

Business Goal

The ‘Maverick’ platform existed for a key business reason. The existing platforms that markets were using were outdated from a code-perspective and coming to their end-of-life. Therefore, markets moving to a new platform was a key strategic business decision.

Context

Understanding the problem

Before I arrived in the team…

A core platform offering, currently live in the UK and Peru and soon to be released in Mexico, achieved feature parity with the existing market-specific solutions.

Lack of product mindset…

Product managers were operating more as project managers when responding to market requests. Their approach focused on gathering and building requirements that customised existing journeys, rather than strategically enhancing the feature offerings.

Critically, they failed to leverage the CRO test success of design decisions and the value of our feature catalog. Ultimately, this resulted in a fractured experience: with only two markets live, each had a differing approach to how to localise the user to a menu offering.

Process

What does product discovery for a new market look like?

Team make-up…

The lean and agile discovery team consists of a cross-functional quartet that included a Project Director, who serves as the primary market contact; a Product Manager, who is responsible for scope definition and control; a Tech Lead, acting as the platform capabilities expert; and myself, the Design Lead, responsible for analysing and interpreting market requirements from an experience perspective.

Collaboration…

We adopt a tri-party decision-making framework (similar to the ‘Three Amigos’ methodology) with the Product Manager and Tech Lead, I hold regular and timely sync-ups to analyse our research findings and strategically categorise features for the market as ‘in-scope’, ‘out-of-scope’, or as ‘net-new’ platform investments.

Kick-off meetings…

This initial engagement with the market will take the form of a video call. The call’s primary goal is to introduce the new platform with a high-level overview and highlight the proven successes achieved in other global markets.

To prepare for this, my key task is to act as a business analyst by conducting thorough market research and competitor analysis. This research is vital for identifying areas where Maverick can enhance the market's current experience and achieve crucial competitive differentiation.

Market project teams…

We partner closely with each market's dedicated project team, who are responsible for testing and maintaining their existing platform and experience. This close alignment allows us to clearly understand the market's specific platform issues, goals, and e-commerce strategy. By working together throughout the project timeline, we ensure the market knows their team has our full support and that we are collectively focused on achieving their best interests.

Key task(s)

Delivering design value

Next steps…

Once the kick-off call is complete, we transition into dedicated 90-minute deep-dive sessions with key functions: merchandising, site authoring, and technology. The objective of these sessions is to meticulously review and discuss crucial discovery findings specific to each area of business operations that can have an influence on how we scope the project.

UX-audit…

This session is dedicated to the market’s e-commerce user-facing experience. Here I will playback my research and findings from the following activities I’ve conducted:

  • Deep-dive analysis of the market’s current site: features, interaction and design patterns.

  • Mapped the current site's features against the Maverick feature catalogue to determine which functionalities can be offered out-of-the-box and which will require net-new development.

  • Analysed all current site CRO test results and benchmarked them against Maverick's core experience data. This comparison allowed us to build a compelling, data-driven argument for transitioning to Maverick's experience patterns, if required.

  • Conducted discovery interviews and usability tests on the market's current site. The goal was to identify key experience blockers and determine which of these issues Maverick has already successfully designed and solved out-of-the-box.

Design as a key stakeholder…

The output of this work is multifaceted: it delivers a comprehensive understanding of Maverick's experience layer capabilities to the market and simultaneously defines the strategic agenda for our upcoming on-site discussions.

Furthermore, this foundational engagement positions me (and the entire design function) as the primary stakeholder and definitive contact for advancing the market's experience performance as part of the overarching platform implementation.

Visiting the market

Culturally deep-diving

Face-to-face workshops…

Our larger markets (Japan, Canada, Australia, etc.) usually come with more complex and demanding requirements. With all of the information sharing - to this point - being conducted digitally via calls and emails, some crucial nuances can be missed. Therefore, wherever possible, as a team, we like to visit the market to replay the key decisions that will need sign-off and to ensure that we haven’t missed a critical use-case that could derail the project.

Understanding front-line operations…

The key value proposition of the Maverick platform is an all-in-one platform offering, which consolidates and replaces the fragmented third-party solutions common in current market tech architectures.

To guarantee full support for in-store technology needs, we will conduct site visits to observe and document the necessary communication and translation protocols between our e-commerce platform and your existing point-of-sale solutions.

From an experience perspective, this gives me a perfect opportunity to interview front-line staff to try and uncover any valuable insights that may benefit future functionality.

Discovery complete…

Upon concluding the market visit, as the discovery team, we will have validated all key requirements, and clearly defined which functionality is in-scope, out-of-scope, and net-new. Crucially, this milestone includes contractual confirmation from the market to authorise the start of the project build.

All that’s left to do is transfer the knowledge we have gained to the project team(s).

Transferring knowledge

Design handover

Configurations…

My core function is to translate regional needs into actionable platform configurations. I define the configuration settings the market require by articulating the key use-cases behind them.

A practical example is the customisation of address entry fields: in the UK, postcode entry is prioritised; but within Japan, a line of address or chome entry is preferred. Articulating these differences is a vital design requirement that will be delivered to the project team as clear acceptance criteria within JIRA tickets.

Market concerns…

When markets are hesitant to adopt a core platform configuration, favouring a custom approach they've already designed, I look to validate the platform solution through targeted data analysis and testing.

For instance, the Japanese market initially insisted on using a chome-selection based interaction within their existing localisation strategy. However, usability interviews and discovery research suggested users actually needed visual confirmation of their address input. We addressed this platform-side by including an embedded Google map in the localisation journey.

Following the market visit, the successful CRO tests of the map integration in the Japan experience provided the data necessary to secure market adoption of the platform approach before development commenced.

Feature gaps identified during discovery fall into two main categories: those that represent a known, roadmapped platform item found in other markets, and those that are unique and typically regulatory-driven for a specific locality.

I concentrate on the latter, defining strategies to incorporate these unique functionalities with minimal impact on the current UI/UX arrangements. I’ll explore a multiple of technically viable solutions through high-level design mapping exercises, ahead of creating a set of low-level prototypes for testing.

All resulting assets and test outcomes are then consolidated into a design handover which consists of Confluence documentation to provide full context on the design decisioning. It’s up to the project team and their designer to decide which approach best suits their timeline.

Feature gaps…

Product planning

New, key functionality

In-depth analysis…

My mandate in this scenario is to scope and define the core functionality, not to deliver production-ready designs.

Therefore, my process commences with a rigorous analysis phase.

  • I will deconstruct the market’s current functionality, rigorously testing it to pinpoint its essential value proposition and its usability pain points.

  • I will then benchmark direct competitors and similar product functionality to understand how they effectively integrate within their respective user experience layers.


These foundational steps will power the identification of common patterns and validate strategic opportunities for market differentiation.

High-level design…

With the analysis complete, the next step is to translate insights into a detailed experience map. This mapping is immediately paired with strategic alignment sessions involving product and engineering. The goal is clear: de-risk the project by proactively identifying and validating key assumptions. This early technical grounding is essential to ensure all future visual explorations are both feasible and perfectly integrated with the established product architecture.

Testing…

I will utilise the design system to quickly generate lean prototypes designed to challenge and validate the critical assumptions identified in the mapping phase. Using a comparative testing approach, the primary goal is to establish which solution—be it one optimised for technical potential or one focused on user preference—yields the most impactful results among test participants, guiding our final strategic design choice.

Output…

With this data, insights and alignment, we as a discovery team, are now informed enough to convey the ‘what’ and ‘why’ value exists in this functionality.

Creating a Product Requirements Document (PRD) signals the end of the my process from a discovery perspective. When the functionality gets picked up from the backlog by a development team, I will then be on hand to support the squad designer as it progresses through a typical sprint development cycle.

Delivering value

Blockers removed, development speed unlocked

Results and impact…

The introduction of the discovery team yielded immediate business results:

  • More market implementations:
    Utilising the discovery process, Pizza Hut achieved a significant acceleration in platform deployment: onboarding four new markets onto the Maverick platform in 12 months - having delivered two the previous year.

  • A healthier backlog workflow:
    The discovery team's oversight of the platform backlog drove a transformation toward robust, globally-aware feature development. We successfully moved away from deadline-driven objectives; instead, the core-platform team's priorities were strategically governed by achieving product value and maximizing market adoption.

Moments of pride:

  • Since this being a new strategic hire for the organisation, my initial work involved collaborating with the discovery team to shape the role and its responsibilities. A standardised and repeatable process was devised —rigorously tested on the first market project—and has been successfully applied to all subsequent markets with great success since.

  • The role demanded a strategic design thinker and clear communicator—not just a tool operator. It required someone who could think systematically and readily explore product documentation for definitive detail. By leveraging this systematic approach and growing my platform knowledge, I quickly established myself as the subject matter expert, ensuring seamless communication and shared understanding across all stakeholder groups.

  • Because the role required a focus on clearly defining and communicating key requirements to other designers, my responsibilities naturally expanded. I moved beyond supporting team project work to leading and coaching members on how to effectively challenge Product Managers regarding deviations that contradicted our core discovery findings. I actively fostered a data-driven approach within the team, consistently challenging members to base decisions on evidence rather than relying on unvalidated assumptions.