Building a UX
Organization
from 0 to 1
Overview & Approach
Role: UX Strategy Contractor → UX Lead
Company: Go-To Foods (formerly Focus Brands)
Team: Cross-functional partners across Marketing, Technology, and Brand
Timeline: 2021–2023
Budget: Limited (incremental UX funding secured through pilot success)
A restaurant conglomerate in Atlanta recognized that outsourcing digital projects was costly and inefficient. To solve this, they set out to build an internal digital agency to support their brands. I was brought in as the company’s first UX professional — responsible for shaping a user-centered culture, improving performance, and demonstrating the tangible value of design thinking to leadership.
Go To Foods (formerly Focus Brands), owns multiple national restaurant brands such as Cinnabon, Auntie Anne’s and Jamba Juice.
Year One
Laying the Groundwork
Insight: Go-To Foods needed to establish a foundation for UX — aligning stakeholders, defining success metrics, and basing each decision in user research and competitive analysis.
Action:
Met with stakeholders, including the CMO and other brand leaders, to define success metrics and align on business goals
Partnered with Marketing and Customer Insights to identify target users and their behaviors
Conducted usability benchmarking across existing sites and major competitors to establish a measurable baseline
Results & Impact:
Revealed key usability issues causing low sales and performance gaps on desktop and mobile
Built relationships with stakeholders through transparency and data-driven communication
Provided insightful performance measurements — showing brands like Panera and Chick-fil-A at 88–95% usability while our products averaged 40–65%
Show Value. Fast.
Insight: Client had limited resources and little knowledge of what UX meant, so I began to focus on proving its impact to leadership through quick wins, data-driven decisions, and visible results.
Action:
Repositioned the “Order Now” CTA in a more prominent and active location on Moes.com, increasing sales by 31%
Partnered with field sales and catering teams to identify and understand high-value customer segments that existed outside of standard marketing data
Conducted live user interviews outside the CMO’s office, allowing leadership to directly hear user insights and feedback
Results & Impact:
Converted from contractor to full-time employee within three months
Secured budget for UX research, including user testing initiatives and even a summer intern
Original Moe’s Website - main CTA to order food and drive revenue was located below the visual fold
Scaling UX Operations
Insight: To sustain our early progress, UX needed scalable systems and repeatable design processes to ensure long-term efficiency and consistency across brands.
Action:
Developed a design pattern library in Sketch to standardize components across seven brand websites, reducing design workload by 40%
Led accessibility audits and training sessions for the digital team to improve compliance and usability
Conducted content audits across all brand sites to identify inconsistencies and outdated assets
Results & Impact:
Reduced UXR note-taking and analysis time by 70%, increasing overall research depth and output
Identified and corrected over $100K in accessibility risks
Found 25% of URLs outdated — leading to a full content overhaul
Secured funding to hire a full-time UX Designer and Content Strategist
