By the mid-2010s, the company began to encounter structural friction. The issue wasn’t food quality or brand recognition. It was the cumulative drag of a customer journey that had grown misaligned with modern expectations. That friction slowed throughout, strained operations, and quietly eroded the P&L.

This was not rhetorical. It signaled a fundamental reorientation toward customer experience as a primary growth lever. McDonald’s chose to

• Prioritize digital infrastructure over traditional operational levers and

• Shift leadership focus and KPIs across the company.

The result is one of the clearest large scale examples of CX driven transformation in modern retail.

Today, digital sales exceed 40% of systemwide sales in McDonald’s top markets, reaching $7B in Q3 2024 alone.

McDonald’s understood a truth some legacy leaders still resist: customer experience is not a cost center; it is a growth engine.

The Starbucks Connection (A Brief Digression)

In the 2010s, McDonald’s was losing ground to tech-forward competitors like Starbucks and Chipotle. Speaking of Starbucks, I’ll have to share the story in a future newsletter about their first digital app. Hint: We at PayPal actually created it. It’s a true story of early fintech meets coffee, involving lots of A/B testing and coffee runs to Starbucks on the PayPal campus. But I digress. Back to the Golden Arches.

⭐ The Pain Points that McDonald’s Could Not Ignore

By 2015, McDonald’s was under pressure.

• Declining relevance with younger customers, who increasingly preferred digital interactions)

• Peak hour wait times exceeding 5 minutes (well above the 3-minute industry standard)

• Inconsistent Service quality across locations and crew members

These were often framed as technology problems. They were not. They were human problems manifesting operationally.

In my experience leading product organizations, this distinction matters. Companies invest significant capital, talent, and sometimes expensive consulting firms. This can lead to building solutions around internal assumptions and bias rather than customer or product-market fit, sometimes justifying prolonged misalignment under the banner of “failing fast”, even as resources drain away.

McDonald’s made a different choice. It invested in customer research and learned that customers were not asking for technology. They were asking for ease.

Specifically:

• Less pressure: No one likes the stress of a line forming behind them while they try to remember a complex family order.

• More control: The ability to customize a meal without the friction of a verbal “game of telephone” at the register.

• More convenience: A way to get hot food without the traditional “park and wait” bottlenecks.

Customers may not articulate solutions, but they are clear about their pain points. Digital became the answer not because it was fashionable, but because it was the only scalable way to bridge the gap between a 70 year old fast food chain and the modern expectations of a seamless and delightful customer experience.

⭐ The First Bet: Self-Order Kiosks

One of the first bets (controversial at the time) that McDonald’s made was rolling out self-order kiosks. Franchisees worried about cost, disruption, and adoption. These concerns were valid.

But leadership pushed forward because kiosks solved a specific friction point: pressure at the counter.

For the first time, customers could browse at their own pace, and customize without embarrassment. For McDonald’s, kiosks created consistent, low-pressure upsell opportunities.

The result?

Kiosks didn’t just improve CX; they increased average order value. When they removed the pressure of the line, customers spent more.

As one of my former CEOs often put it: “improving CX + EX = ↑EBITDA. When customer and employee experience are neglected, technology can be an expensive ornament.

⭐ The Second Bet: The Mobile App

The mobile app began as a simple digital coupon book. Building this required building capabilities in a culture and business model that were never needed before

Leadership made a decisive call: “We’re going to build digital capabilities even if we don’t know how yet.”

Today, the app anchors the ecosystem. It drives loyalty, repeat visits, and data-driven personalization at scale. More importantly, it established a direct, data rich relationship with the customer, something McDonald’s historically lacked.

⭐ The Third Bet I want to highlight: Fixing the Kitchen “Last Mile”

Front-end digital/AI experiences (mobile app) fail quickly if back-of-house operations remain analog.

McDonald’s recognized that true friction removed from the CX falls apart the moment a car pulls into the parking lot.

This is where some legacy brands struggle. They build the digital front end but leave the back of the house untouched.

Previously, mobile orders were treated like drive-through orders, the kitchen began cooking only once the customer arrived. With geofencing, kitchens are alerted when the customer is approximately three minutes away.

This enabled:

• Real-time Sync: The meal is prepped exactly as the car pulls into the lot.

• Nearly 50% reductions during peak periods. Allowing them to handle higher volumes without increasing kitchen stress.

• Elimination of the industry-wide “park and wait” bottleneck.

My son worked at McDonald’s as a teenager. In training, they were taught that if a customer complains food isn’t warm, make a fresh meal. That’s the brand promise. The key to McDonald’s digital transformation was to transform both how a customer places an order AND the kitchen’s ability to fulfill it quickly and accurately.

In March 2025, McDonald’s announced that all 43,000 restaurants would receive a technology upgrade, including internet connected kitchen equipment, AI-enabled drive-throughs and AI-powered tools for managers and crew. The will drive better experiences for its crew, reinforcing the link between CX, EX, and financial performance.

⭐ The Flywheel Effect: Why their Growth is Exponential

The launch of MyMcDonald’s Rewards in 2021 was the final piece of the puzzle. Anonymous transactions became known customers. Data informed operations. Operations improved experience. Experience drove loyalty.

This created their Digital/AI Growth Flywheel:

At this point, McDonald’s realized something fundamental: Digital was no longer supporting the business. Digital was the business.

They aligned the company around three operational shifts:

⭐ The Takeaway for Leaders

McDonald’s didn’t become a digital powerhouse by chasing technology. It became one by relentlessly improving customer experience.

Digital was the tool.

CX was the strategy.

Growth was the outcome.

If an 85 year old global fast food chain can reinvent itself through customer experience, any company can.

But only if leadership is willing to treat CX not as an initiative but as the most scalable, defensible, and profitable growth strategy available.

If you're navigating these silos or trying to move past the "pilot trap," I’d love to trade notes. Reach out to discuss your own transformation journey.

There was a senior executive, someone smart, charismatic, and well respected who became captivated by a new product idea. In their mind, it wasn’t just a concept; it was the breakthrough, the thing that would tilt the market and redefine the company’s trajectory.

Our team did what teams do: we ran the research, built the prototype, and pushed the idea through every lens we had and measured its viability, desirability, and feasibility. And at every turn, the results were the same. The numbers didn’t hold. The risk outweighed the return. The market simply didn’t want what we were building.

But the truth wasn’t the hard part.
The hard part was deciding whether to say it.

Inside the team, the debate grew quiet and tense. Some suggested we keep going and “let the data speak for itself over time.” Others worried, with good reason, that this leader wasn’t going to welcome the bad news. A few of us wondered out loud about the cost of silence: the money being spent, the hours being pulled from higher-value work, the opportunity cost that no spreadsheet could capture.

Looking back now, I’m certain of something I wasn’t sure of then:

The executive would have wanted to know the truth.

Not because it was comfortable, but because clarity is the only real currency leaders have.

No one told them.

Not because they lacked integrity, but because they lacked psychological safety.

That experience became the first of many moments where I saw how silence shapes organizations. Over the years, I’ve collected dozens of stories like this, sometimes as an employee caught in the middle, other times as a leader realizing just how much I wasn’t hearing.

Those moments inspired me to write this article.

Because the truth is:

What your team won’t tell you can hurt your business far more than what they do tell you.

Silence is expensive. In organizations of any size, employees routinely withhold information their leaders desperately need: misaligned priorities, internal friction, or the inefficiencies that drain performance.

Every leader has blind spots. Every employee knows the risk of pointing them out.

Here are the top 10 things your team is not telling you.

1. Misalignment

Your pet project isn’t what the market wants.

Most employees would never say it. Challenging a leader’s beloved initiative feels like challenging the leader themselves. The fear? Being labeled “negative” or not a “team player”.

2. Siloes

Internal turf wars are slowing everything down.

Teams maintain a veneer of harmony, while friction festers underneath. Speaking up feels unprofessional and political, so no one does.

3. Friction

Your newest hire is the biggest bottleneck.

This is the truth every team dreads raising. It feels like criticizing your judgement, authority, and your ability to pick talent.

4. Competency

We don’t actually have the skills to do what you’re asking.

Most people would rather struggle privately than risk looking incompetent. Employees fear being exposed, judged, or replaced.

5. Ambiguity

We don’t know who actually owns this decision.

In matrixed organizations, admitting confusion about ownership can be misread as incompetence. So instead, progress stalls from uncertainty no one wants to expose.

6. Blindspot

A startup is gaining ground, and we’re not tracking them.

Acknowledging a threat forces the team to confront something uncomfortable: the market is shifting, and the company is not shifting with it.

7. Vendor

The multi-million dollar vendor we hired is failing.

When a leader champions a vendor, employees hesitate to show cracks. No one wants to embarrass the person who signed the contract.

8. Overload

Your priority list is impossible.

Teams swallow the frustration because pushing back can be misconstrued as resistance. So they try to do it all, and quietly burn out.

9. Inefficiency

Half our week disappears into low-value meetings.

Meetings become rituals. Challenging a ritual feels like challenging the organization itself.

10. Irrelevance

Much of our work doesn’t ladder up to the strategy.

This is the scariest truth of all, because it highlights that their work is misaligned, and they worry their job isn’t secure.

The good news: Silence is reversible

If your instincts tell you that something is off and that your team is holding back, they probably are.

But this can be fixed.

In my experience, reversing silence comes down to three core leadership behaviors:

1. Open the door.

2. Seek the truth.

3. Value the mess.

1. Open the Door.

Be accessible. Model vulnerability.

When leaders disappear into meeting rooms or offices, employees interpret it as disinterest.

The fix is simple: be visible.

• Walk the floor.

• Sit with your team.

• Show up where the work is happening.

Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder, famously worked without an office, choosing open spaces because they encouraged organic interaction and constant, unfiltered feedback. His presence sent a clear message: I’m here, and I’m ready to listen.

But visibility alone isn’t enough. You need structure behind it:

• Hold consistent skip-level one-on-ones.

• Ask disarming questions like:

  • What do you need me to START or STOP doing?

  • On a scale from 1 to 10, how well resourced are you?

• Create anonymous reporting mechanisms for risks no one wants to raise publicly.

And model the behavior yourself:

1. Admit mistakes. “I own that call. Here’s what I misjudged.”

2. State your biases upfront. Invite others to correct them.

3. Show who you are. Be vulnerable.

Vulnerability is contagious. When leaders show it, something amazing happens. Teams begin to mirror it.

When I meet a new team for the first time, I always start with a “This is Me” slide, a single page where I share parts of my life that can’t be Googled or found on LinkedIn. No accomplishments. No titles. Just the real, human things that shape who I am.

What happens next is remarkable.

People open up. They share back. Walls drop.

And in every organization where I’ve used this approach, the practice has spread far beyond my direct team. Leaders and employees began introducing themselves the same way, creating a culture where authenticity wasn’t just encouraged, it was modeled.

2. Seek the truth.

Be curious.

Most leaders interpret silence as alignment. More often it’s fear.

Instead of evaluating, explore:

• “What needs to happen next?”

• “How could we have done this better?”

• “If you were leading this project, what would you change?

Avoid the most silence-inducing phrase in corporate life:

“Are there any questions?”

Try instead:

• “What part of this plan do you trust the least?”

• “What’s the one reason this could fail?”

• “What’s missing?”

Structure meetings to invite participation.

• During meetings when the presenters are sharing customer insights and research, I try to ask “Did anything surprise you about the findings?”.

• When a decision is being discussed, ensure that everyone speaks once before it’s made. It pulls quieter thinkers into the conversation and prevents dominant voices from taking over.

3. Value the mess.

Reward truth-telling, not perfection.

Psychological safety isn’t soft. It’s strategic.

As Harvard professor Amy Edmonson, whose work I first encountered at HBS, notes: “Psychological safety is the single most important factor in team learning and innovation.”.

When someone surfaces a hard truth:

• Appreciate the courage before evaluating the content.

• Treat failure like data.

• Run blameless post-mortems that ask why, not who.

• Distinguish preventable errors from intelligent failures.

• Avoid the cardinal sin of punishing the messenger.

One moment of frustration can erase months of trust.

The Cultural Flip

Leaders who adopt these practices transform their organizations:

From:

Cultures of impression management

(Hide problems to look competent)

To:

Cultures of truth-telling

(Expose problems to improve the system)

The payoff is measurable:

Higher engagement, better decisions, and sharper execution.

Truth-telling isn’t just good for your team — it’s good for your business. Let’s make it happen.

📩 DM me if you are experiencing these issues and we can workshop them together.

💬 Reply here and share your own experience with hidden truths in your organization.

This is a costly error. The traditional, annualized, project-based funding process works well for finite projects where success is measured by completion and designed for fixed lasting value (e.g. a bridge). This approach is not a good match for building successful digital products (e.g., Google Maps), where value compounds over time, with continuous feature releases, and new integrations.

I have seen this failure firsthand at Fortune 500 companies and others. The legacy funding model creates a vicious cycle where up to 80% of technology spend is dedicated to “keeping the lights on” (maintenance activities), structurally starving high growth product teams of innovation capital. This results in missed critical opportunities to improve adoption and increase revenue.

To retain their competitive advantage, companies must shift away from legacy project-based funding models and operationalize a Product Investment Model.

The Problem in a Picture: A Bridge versus Google Maps

The core of this distinction, and its financial consequence is perhaps best illustrated by a simple contrast:

The Project Funding Trap

The rigid, transactional model of project-based funding (fixed investment focused on completing a deliverable), is fundamentally unsuitable for digital/AI products. Here are the four critical strategic risks:

1. Stagnation: Project model assumes success is achieved at launch, eliminating the sustained capital required for continuous value creation. This results in the product’s descent into irrelevance while competitors evolve.

2. Misalignment of Metrics: Success is incorrectly measured by budget compliance (“On time, on budget”) rather than business outcomes (e.g. revenue, conversion, retention). This incentivizes teams to deliver code rather than commercial value.

3. Compounding Debt (Reduced Product Velocity): Fixed deadlines pressure teams to forgo sound architecture or quality. This creates technical debt, trapping the enterprise in expensive maintenance cycles.

4. Erosion of Institutional Knowledge: Project teams are temporary and often disbanded upon completion resulting in the loss of deep customer understanding and domain expertise critical for maintaining product velocity and compounding growth.

Product Investment Model: A Playbook for Operationalizing Product Funding

We need to shift our mindset to treat digital products as “venture capital portfolios” where investment is continuous and conditional upon demonstrated results and growth. My work with established enterprises has confirmed this model works, and I want to share my playbook.

1. Fund the Team, Not the Deliverable: Establish durable, persistent cross functional Product Teams (not temporary project crews). Allocate continuous funding to the team itself, viewing it as a growth engine fueled by operational capital. The focus shifts entirely to outcomes, not just output.

2. Align Authority with Accountability: Give investment authority directly to the functions accountable for commercial outcomes (e.g. CPO, CRO, CEO). The individuals signing the checks must be the P&L owners.

3. Implement a Product Portfolio Review: Replace rigid annual budgeting with a quarterly product review. All product teams must defend their budget based on demonstrated value (conversion, retention, revenue). This enforces continuous accountability and allows you to strategically divest from low-growth products.

The Mandate for Product Investment Model

Digital products are not projects with a finish line; they are a living, compounding growth engine. To compete and lead in digital, we must fundamentally shift the mindset away from the “one-and-done” model.

My playbook is more than just theory. It is informed by my time leading products at world-class digital native companies, and uniquely validated by my experience successfully implementing these transformations within established enterprises. This approach ensures rapid, real-world results.

Companies have the talent and the resources. They also need an operating model that effectively directs capital to enable teams to drive value.

The Product Investment Model restructures capital allocation to accelerate growth, mitigate the risk of obsolescence, and strengthen a company’s enduring competitive position. It is the critical pillar for any successful digital transformation.

👇I welcome your insights, organizational challenges or observed successes. Contact me directly to discuss and delve deeper into digital transformation.

Having built and scaled product organizations at companies like Intuit, PayPal, eBay, Change Healthcare and Canada Post over the past two decades, one thing became crystal clear: the companies that thrive have Product DNA woven into every part of the organization.

This became undeniable one evening while discussing “culture eats strategy for breakfast” with my CFO and CHRO. The debate was lively, focused on the growth vision we had just presented to the board. We exchanged a flurry of ideas about our workplace culture’s problematic areas before, inevitably, the conversation drifted.

The debate stayed with me. While authorities on workplace culture discuss employee turnover and psychological needs, the concept often remains too large and nebulous. It can become a catch-all for organizational problems.

The truth is, culture is the DNA of how a company works, it’s felt in every process, decision, communication, and meeting. However, the specific part of company culture that most impacts the ability to build successful, resilient, and enduring businesses is what I call Product DNA.

What is Strong Product DNA?

Product DNA is a metaphor for a deep organization wide commitment to core principles that guide how products are conceived, developed, and delivered. This is the bedrock of a company’s competitive advantage and sustainable growth.

As Albert Einstein said, “A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” Now that we have defined the problem, we can fix it.

How to Recognize a Strong Product DNA in a Company?

A strong Product DNA is not a superficial layer; it is the organizational architecture that elite companies build to achieve market resilience. It is a living part of the organization that can be observed in its actions, decisions, and structure. It’s the difference between a company that talks about being customer-centric and one that genuinely operates that way.

Here are the four foundational components and observable behaviors that reveal a strong Product DNA:

1. Customer Obsession:

Giving the customer a ‘seat’ at every decision-making table.

• User-first Mindset: Teams consistently ask: “what is the impact on the customer?” before proceeding with any strategy, feature, or process change.

• Consistency across all Touchpoints: The customer experience feels unified and reliable, whether they are interacting with the product, sales team, or support desk.

• The Customer is Present: Customer insights, pain points, and usage data are standard talking points in every key meeting, not just product reviews.

At Intuit, participating in user research and conducting “follow-me-homes” wasn’t just a UX/Product exercise, it was a x-functional assignment. At ebay, we had to make a certain number of purchases on the platform to stay intimately close to the customer experience. This created empathy for the customer, it made prioritization much easier.

2. High Alignment, High Autonomy (HAHA):

Ensuring the entire organization is pulling in the same direction while empowering teams with the freedom to execute quickly.

• Shared outcomes and language: Every department, from Finance to Marketing and HR have shared outcomes and objectives. They may have different departmental strategies but they all speak the common language of the customer.

• Decentralized problem solving: Employees at all levels, particularly those in customer facing roles, are empowered to solve customer problems, rather than being strictly managed top-down.

Netflix culture of “highly aligned, loosely coupled” gives x-functional teams the freedom and responsibility to make decisions that align with the overall strategy, enabling speed and innovation.

3. Data-Driven Decision Making:

The organization uses data to make informed choices, replacing reliance on assumptions, or internal politics.

• Data-driven Methodology: Teams rely on quantitative and qualitative data (not HiPPO - highest paid person’s opinion) to define problems and validate solutions.

• Clear, Outcome-oriented KPIs: Success is measured using clear KPIs (Key performance indicators) or metrics tied directly to customer value and business outcomes (e.g. user retention, time-to-value etc.), ensuring everyone knows what winning looks like.

Spotify is a prime example of deep data integration. They use data on listening habits, skips and user generated playlists to inform new features, recommendations, and content strategy.

4. Disciplined Innovation and Agile Execution:

This focuses on the organizational ability to move quickly and respond effectively to learning.

• Culture of experimentation: A culture that embraces experimentation and learning. Failures are treated as learning opportunities, not causes for punishment. The organization prioritizes rapid, safe-to-fail experiments to validate assumptions quickly so as to avoid over-investment.

• Seamless execution: Cross-functional teams are structured and empowered to move with speed, frequently delivering small batches of improvements to the user and incorporating real-world feedback in the next cycle.

Amazon uses continuous, small-scale A/B testing or “two-pizza teams” to rapidly ship, measure, and iterate on virtually every aspect of their e-commerce experience

How Leaders can Build Strong Product DNA at their company

Building Product DNA is a leadership exercise, it’s the courage to change how we operate not just what we build. It requires intentional choices about how the organization is funded, structured, and rewarded. This is not about incremental improvement; this is about achieving an enduring competitive advantage.

I have successfully implemented these changes at massive, complex and traditional organizations where the existing culture was deeply entrenched. It requires a non-negotiable commitment to successfully impact business outcomes, improve customer NPS and increase employee engagement.

Without these changes, even brilliant teams struggle to scale, innovate for growth or waste capital on low-ROI initiatives. Embedding Product DNA requires a dedicated focus on people, governance, and the smart application of technology (including AI) to amplify talent and insights.

Strategic Imperatives: Implementing the Transformation Framework

Lever 1: Governance & Empathy (Voice of Customer Framework)

• Establish the “Seat at the Table” to cultivate customer obsession. Leaders must intentionally force the integration of the voice of the customer into every major decision, moving empathy from a sentiment to a requirement.

Lever 2: Execution & Alignment (HAHA Model, Prioritization Framework)

• Define and evangelize the strategy: Define and publicize the vision and OKRs. Ensure that all teams know the destination empowers them to use their mastery and expertise to figure out the path and tools required to get there.

• Reward impact, not activity: Shift performance reviews and incentive systems to reward teams for achieving business and customer KPIs not managing timelines.

• Establish value-based prioritization: Implement a framework that is based on customer value, company effort, and business outcome. Everyone should understand why certain projects get funded and others don’t.

• Decentralize decision-making: Structure teams into outcome-oriented squads that own an entire experience or metric. This provides the necessary autonomy to move quickly without needing executive sign-off for day to day decisions, which will drastically reduce unnecessary meetings and decks.

• Protect Velocity: If an executive wants to be involved in decisions, they need to make themselves available to the working team to ensure launches stay on track.

Lever 3: Innovation & Risk (Funding Model, DaaS, Investment Ratios)

• Fund product discovery and de-risk portfolios: Create a mechanism and dedicate resources to enable innovation.

• Centralize and democratize data access: Make product usage and customer behavioural data easily accessible and understandable to everyone in the organization.

• Normalize learning: Run retrospectives on success stories not only failures, to make successful practices repeatable.

Resources for Leaders to Transform their company DNA

If you’re curious how Product DNA can unlock growth in your organization, we offer direct engagement to accelerate your product, CX, and digital transformation:

Let’s Connect. Stop managing projects and start accelerating growth.

Choose your next strategic step to embed Product DNA Transformation Framework:

🤝 Strategic Advisory & Partnership: Schedule a discovery call to explore fractional executive leadership or advisory role to workshop your challenges.

🎤Content & Engagement: Explore co-creating high-impact content (e.g. articles, podcasts, white papers) to elevate your brand’s thought leadership.