Pizza Hut - Store Admin
When Pizza Hut sunset its legacy store management platform, the U.S. business needed a new operational experience without disrupting day-to-day restaurant operations.
Working within an aggressive timeline, I designed foundational workflows that enabled franchise operators to manage store availability, fulfillment, inventory, notifications, and operational controls while extending Maverick, Pizza Hut International's existing design system, with new patterns for U.S. operations.
Impact
6,8000 stores
Timeline
12 months
Role
Senior Product Designer
01
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Building the Operational Backbone for 6,800+ Pizza Hut Restaurants
Pizza Hut's U.S. restaurants relied on fragmented tools, manual processes, and a legacy platform, QuikOrder, to manage daily operations. As the company prepared to retire QuikOrder, the opportunity was bigger than replacing outdated software: create a unified, scalable operational experience built for the U.S. market.
I led the UX design of Store Admin, partnering with Product, Engineering, and Operations to extend Maverick, Pizza Hut's international design system, into a centralized platform tailored to the needs of U.S. restaurants.
Before
Fragmented Operations
Disconnected tools and inconsistent workflows made everyday tasks harder to manage.
AFTER
One operational platform
A centralized experience bringing essential restaurant operations together through consistent, scalable patterns.
02
Research & Discovery
The edge cases weren't edge cases.
They were the job.
Working with franchise operators, restaurant teams, Product, and Operations revealed a consistent pattern: exceptions weren’t rare. They were everyday operations.
Above-Store Manager
One role. Multiple locations. Constant decisions.
Delivery & safety
Restrict delivery to high-risk areas while maintaining service coverage.
Evolving payments
Adapt to changing payment methods, policies, and operational requirements.
Operational exceptions
Navigate split hours, temporary closures, and unexpected disruptions.
People & coordination
Align restaurant teams, franchise operators, and corporate stakeholders.
Multi-store complexity
Apply changes across locations while preserving individual store needs.
Limited visibility
Lack of clarity into what changed, who made the change, and which locations need attention.
Persona - Destiny R.
03
THE CHALLENGE
Don't rebuild. Leverage, then extend.
Pizza Hut already had Maverick, a store-management design system used internationally. Rather than recreate every U.S. workflow from scratch, I started with its existing patterns and identified where U.S. operations required something more.
04
THE PIVOT
From responding to requirements to
helping define them.
Instead of waiting for individual stories to reach Design, I started getting involved earlier in planning. This exposed a mismatch between what we inherited from the UK model and how U.S. operator actually managed their stores.
THE ORIGINAL ASSUMPTION
UK model
The UK model assumed one manager oversaw one store at a time.
WhAT I UNCOVERED
U.S. reality
In the U.S., "Above-Store" managers can oversee multiple locations at once.
05
EXECUTION
Building for the way U.S restaurants actually operate
I extended Maverick to support more complex U.S. operations, designing flexible store-level controls and scaling those capabilities across multiple locations.
Extend Maverick for more flexibility at the store level
Give store managers more control when real world conditions change at the store level.
Real-world flexibility for everyday changes
Give managers a faster way to adapt store-level settings when local conditions shift during the day.
- Split hours
- Temporary schedules
- Scheduled closures
- Recurring exceptions
B. Extend flexibility at scale. One change, multiple stores.
Above Store Managers previously had to repeat the same updates across individual restaurants. I extended store-level controls into bulk workflows, allowing managers to make changes across multiple locations at once.
06
Real world stress Test
When a $2 promotion put Store Admin to the test
Pizza Hut's $2 Personal Pan Pizza promotion led to a surge in future orders, orders placed in advance for pickup or delivery.
Some restaurants had hundreds of orders waiting before the day even started, overwhelming teams before their shifts began.
THE CHALLENGE
Demand was outpacing capacity.
Restaurants needed to temporarily turn off future ordering, but that option wasn't available in Store Admin. Changes had to be made store by store through the backend, which wasn't practical at this scale.
The design approach
A new control in just a couple of days.
Because I'd already built the foundation for bulk management, I was able to quickly design a future-order toggle that let operations turn off future ordering across multiple stores at once, without affecting same-day orders.
THE Solution
A little more control over the Tuesday rush.
Ahead of the weekly promotion, managers could pause future orders across multiple stores at once, giving restaurant teams room to manage demand.
Once the rush was over, they could turn future ordering back on just as easily, without affecting other ordering options.
07
Extending maverick
Turning solutions into reusable patterns.
I built and maintained a U.S. Store Admin component library on top of Maverick, reusing existing components while introducing new patterns to support more complex U.S. operations.
01 - COMPONENTS & VARIANTS
Building for consistency.
Reusable Figma components with defined states and variants for scheduling, restrictions, notifications, and operational status.
02 — INTERACTION PATTERNS
Making complex workflows feel familiar.
Standardized interactions for bulk editing, confirmations, and system feedback so new capabilities followed consistent patterns.
03 — DOCUMENTATION & GOVERNANCE
Making the system easier to extend.
Established usage guidelines, design tokens, and contribution processes to keep the library consistent as Store Admin evolved.
07
Reflection
