Everyone loved it. Nobody could act on the real problem.

I mostly listened. Asked questions, recorded the call, wrote everything down.

They kept circling a phrase — holistic excellence, sometimes the excellence loop. They'd say it, move on, and come back to it a few minutes later. Nobody defined it, and I don't think they needed to. It was the thing they were reaching for.

Because here's what kept happening. They were describing a shift lead app. But every time they explained why they wanted one, they ended up describing how the five products they already owned might finally work together. That part wasn't in the brief anywhere. It was just in how they talked about it.

So before I drew a single screen, I went and mapped what they already had.

The only way to draw it was to follow one complaint all the way through.

So I picked something small and real — a team member flags overcooked fries — and traced every place it has to travel before anything actually changes. Five products, each owned by a different group, each doing its part correctly.

Appeals matter more than they might sound. Scores and bonuses are tied to how a restaurant is performing, so a single finding has real money attached to it. That's the pressure holding the whole loop together.

But the moment someone actually has to fix something, the work leaves the product. Email, Slack, a group text — whatever the operator uses that day. The shift lead app wasn't a new product. It was the missing piece of a loop that was falling out of the system every single time.

Drawing it also surfaced something nobody had asked me to look at. Five products doing one job, with the handoffs between them undefined, is not a shift lead problem. It's an argument for consolidating what already exists.

Nobody asked me to present findings. I asked for the time anyway.

I walked them through the loop first — the whole thing, one complaint travelling end to end, including the part where it drops out of the system. Then I showed what I thought we could do about it: five products collapsed into three. One for operators, one for headquarters, one for content.

The consolidation mattered less than the reasoning behind it, so I spent most of the time on the why. Which products were really doing the same job. Where a handoff was costing more than the feature it connected. What we'd gain by treating it as one system instead of five that happened to share a name.

That conversation is what changed the size of the project. It stopped being a shift lead app and became a 2030 vision — not because I pitched it that way, but because once the map was on the screen, the bigger version was the obvious one.

Those two calls left me with a question I couldn't answer from where I was sitting.

If two teams I'd never met were worried about overlap, were there others? And was anyone already having the consolidation conversation at a level above all of us?

So I asked Chick-fil-A's head of UX for time. He isn't in my reporting line — I'm a contractor, so I report into my own team and the project leads, not into their design org. That's why we hadn't crossed paths three weeks into a project like this one.

Three weeks in, the prototype was finished and my bosses took it to the room.

Stakeholders responded well. Then it went further up, and the executives responded well too — which is the part I didn't expect, because I'd built it to answer a question about shift leads, not to set direction for anything.

The 2030 prototype became the standard. Every new internal application at Chick-fil-A is now expected to move toward that design language and that structure.

And a new internal team was formed to take it further — to use those designs as the basis for one application that consolidates the hundred-plus tools operators are working with today.

Which is a genuinely good outcome, and I'm proud of it. It also created a problem I keep thinking about.