Starbucks

Starbucks is a global coffeehouse chain founded in 1971 in Seattle, Washington, renowned for ethically sourcing and roasting high-quality arabica coffee. As the premier roaster and retailer of specialty coffee, it operates over 35,000 stores in more than 80 countries, offering a wide range of beverages, food items, and packaged products.

Key Achievements

• Grew user adoption and engagement of a suite of 19 applications akin to an “App Store” from approximately 700 users per month to over 12,000 per month, representing a 17x increase in monthly active users.

• Drove the quantitative and qualitative UX research and wireframing of Starbucks store health pyramid dashboards that led to the eventual patent grant, no. 12,236,382, for “system and graphical interface for providing store-level diagnostics and remediation”.

• Aligned UX strategies with business objectives and integrated agile practices, accelerating delivery across product and engineering teams.

• Led cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, and stakeholders; managed a distributed team of UX designers, researchers, and UI engineers across a vendor/employee mix embedded in product squads.

• Operational outcomes included faster concept validation via rapid prototyping and design system reuse, and improved feature adoption through iterative usability testing.

Testimonials

Jason was such an amazing boss! He is supportive of his direct reports and always tries to make sure you have what you need to do your job. But he also lets you have all of the independence you want to get your job done. At Starbucks' data group, he started a UX program from scratch, which was extremely difficult given they did not have any of the building blocks (no design, no research, no product management, no agile, etc.). It was so hard to leave Starbucks as he really is one of the best bosses I have ever had. Any company or team would be happy to have him!

— Jessica Davies, Staff UX Researcher