Company
Square
RolE
Product designer & researcher
When
Q3 2022
Scope
Vision and strategy
When I joined Square's self-serve ordering team, restaurants were returning to traditional ordering and the product's role was unclear. Rather than jumping to solutions, I ran a workshop with 10 cross-functional partners and partnered with a user researcher to interview diners with different levels of comfort with self-serve ordering. I helped the team build a shared understanding of the problem before developing a solution.
The workshop and research fed into a broad ideation phase. I developed 30 concepts across directions ranging from social and group features to personalization, pre-arrival planning, and split billing, each grounded in a set of design principles the team aligned on early.
To get genuine reactions, I prototyped three deliberately provocative directions rather than safe ones. Bold concepts tend to surface what people actually value, not just what they say they want. Testing confirmed that diners responded to features that made ordering more convenient and personal, like recommendations and pre-ordering, while rejecting features that felt too transactional or tech-forward.
By involving cross-functional partners early, the work arrived at annual planning with built-in advocates. Two of my recommendations were funded for the following year's roadmap, several teams referenced the research for their own projects, and the workshop template I developed was adopted by other designers at Square running their own sessions.
