PepsiCo / Frito-Lay North America ran a $33M-a-day operation on 20-year-old tools. We designed and shipped four interconnected products in 18 months — modernizing every touchpoint from farm to factory to meeting consumers wherever they are.
Frito-Lay North America is one of the world's largest snack companies — running 150,000 sales routes and serving retailers through multiple go-to-market channels. But their frontline tools hadn't been updated since Apple announced the first iPod.
Sales reps spent hours on manual data entry. Managers had almost zero real-time visibility. And the company had no way to sell directly to consumers. Leadership saw both problems as urgent: modernize from the inside out, while simultaneously opening a new consumer revenue channel before a competitor did it first.
We unified Frito-Lay's fragmented operations into a single intelligent ecosystem using the IBM Garage methodology. The Digital Transformation Program delivered four interconnected enterprise platforms that created a shared source of truth — enabling real-time visibility, data-driven decision-making, and frictionless workflows across sales, distribution, and consumer intelligence.
Our approach combined co-creation, rapid prototyping, value orchestration and continuous validation to compress what would typically take years of transformation into an 18-month, delivery-focused engagement.
Brought together field sales, distribution, retail, IT, and executives in facilitated workshops to align on vision, validate ideas, and ensure shared ownership of outcomes.
Built interactive prototypes quickly and tested them with real users in the field. Iterated based on feedback before committing engineering resources, reducing rework by 60%.
Applied structured design thinking to enterprise challenges. Tied user insights directly to business outcomes, ensuring every design decision mapped to measurable value.
Embedded feedback loops throughout delivery. Tracked user adoption, pain points, and business metrics post-launch to drive continuous optimization and improvement.
As Executive Design Director and IBM Garage Program Lead, I led the end-to-end design delivery of this enterprise transformation — from discovery through launch across all four interconnected products.
Set the strategic north star for Frito-Lay's enterprise ecosystem — translating complex business requirements across sales, distribution, and retail into a coherent design strategy that aligned 300+ team members, executives, and stakeholders around a unified customer-centric vision.
Owned UX design and product strategy for Sales Enablement, Retail Partner Portal, Supply Chain Optimization, and Consumer Intelligence platforms simultaneously — ensuring visual and experiential consistency while allowing each platform to solve unique user problems at scale.
Built a comprehensive design system from the ground up that served 300+ engineers, designers, and product managers — reducing design-to-development cycles by 50% and ensuring consistency across all four platforms without sacrificing platform-specific user needs.
Facilitated design sprints, validation sessions, and stakeholder workshops that brought together sales, distribution, retail, IT, and executive leadership — compressing months of typical alignment work into focused, outcome-driven engagements.
Partnered with product and business teams to connect design decisions to business outcomes — resulting in 92% adoption rates, $8M in operational savings, and platforms that now support $100M+ in annual revenue for the business.
Rather than rebuilding tools in isolation, we designed a unified digital ecosystem — four interconnected products sharing a common design language system (iOS 2.0 for Retail Execution), research framework, and delivery methodology.
A modern mobile platform replacing fragmented tools for 25,000 frontline employees. Built from field research — riding along with sales reps, shadowing drivers.
Self-service B2B commerce for 30,000+ active customers — reducing out-of-stocks and costly rush shipments while improving product discovery.
Replacing a 20+ year old handheld "brick" with a radically simplified mobile app — co-designed across 234 touch points and hundreds of hours of field research.
FLNA had never sold directly to consumers. We designed and launched Snacks.com in just 30 days — using rapid co-creation and prototype testing with real consumers.
In the first three months, we stood up and deployed two design systems, Frito Lay Salesforce Lightning and a new iOS 2.0 Design System — cutting Xamarin development time by over 85% and enabling consistent, scalable experiences across all four workstreams. Built on atomic design principles: atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and production-ready code.
To connect design decisions to business outcomes, we developed four proprietary frameworks:
Airtable-based framework linking user friction directly to measurable business value.
Breaking capabilities into quantifiable components for strategic prioritization.
Unified design narrative aligning stakeholders around shared customer outcomes.
Connecting experience decisions to back-end platforms and analytics systems.
Streamlined workflows and automated processes delivered significant operational savings across the enterprise.
Field representatives now save ~30 minutes per day through simplified workflows, freeing time for higher-value customer interactions.
Four interconnected platforms now manage $33M in daily revenue, with B2B Commerce generating $105M annual revenue and new D2C channel creating entirely new revenue streams.
Design system and streamlined processes reduced time from concept to launch, enabling faster product iterations and market responsiveness.
Frito-Lay was recognized with a Salesforce Partner Innovation Award for the groundbreaking Snacks to You B2B Commerce platform. The award honors the innovative approach to digital commerce that transformed how retailers and distributors order directly from Frito-Lay, demonstrating how thoughtful design, seamless integration, and user-centered problem solving can drive tangible business value at enterprise scale.
"When it comes to making things simple, IBM is partnering with us to do our design effort — to figure out how we make things as simple as our ingredients."
— Kevin Buehler, Senior Director, Frito-Lay North America
