McDonald’s Convenience Acceleration
In many ways, McDonald’s invented the idea that a brand could be built around a convenience value proposition. They knew exactly where to locate their restaurants geographically, and could serve up piping hot, quality American cheese burgers, fries and shakes at an unmatched speed of service. A powerful and simple value proposition enabled them to scale to over 37,000 restaurants in over 120 markets, serving over 70M customers per day. McDonald’s speed for customers made it THE key case study learned in Operations Management by every MBA around the world.
In 2016, the problem was that McDonald’s leadership recognized they had missed the shift of what convenience meant. Apple, Amazon, and Uber got people to assume their every want and need would be one tap away. Consumers increasingly value connection over geography for convenience. McDonald’s had little to no real digital value proposition. If you wanted to enjoy McDonald’s, it meant you were going to visit a restaurant. It also meant McDonald’s themselves hadn’t really figured out how to bake digital into their organization.
I led an interdisciplinary team which not only defined the strategy for a modern, convenience-oriented CX value proposition, but also the path to a modern capability set and operating model built around agile at scale. This strategy enabled new ordering and fulfillment models for customers underpinned by an future state digital product architecture build on a shared set of APIs which would allow for more rapid evolution of the CX. The case for change was brought to the McDonald’s board and funded, ultimately allowing for mobile ordering in over 20,000 restaurants in just a year later.
Core to the strategy was identifying a set of 9 new journeys which were desired by customers and which would be enabled by the transformation. This set of nine, the “journey architecture”, was then detailed out highlighting the core phases and activities, key customer needs, concepts for what exactly the future experience would enable, and the capabilities required.
McDonald’s went from doing zero ordering to now being one of the largest digital commerce players in the world. While there are always struggles to transform at this scale, the direction set in 2016 still echos in the published strategy and investor comments today.