4 years, 15 to 500
I joined Owner as employee number 15 and stayed four years. In that time the company raised Series A to C, grew to around 500 people, and reached a $1 billion valuation.
Joining at 15 people means there is no design function to inherit. You are deciding what the product is while also deciding how it gets built, what it looks like, and what “good” means — and then doing it again every time the company doubles.
Building the foundations
I designed the foundations of Owner’s products: the core surfaces restaurants use every day, and the patterns everything since has been built on.
Almost none of that happened alone. I worked very closely with the CTO and with the engineers building it, refining the product together as it went. At that size everyone was carrying a piece of the picture — what restaurants were actually asking for, what the system could realistically do — and much of the job was drawing that knowledge out of a small team and making sure none of it got lost.
Scaling that work mattered as much as making it. As the team grew, the job shifted from drawing every screen to making sure a much larger group could draw consistent ones — which is what eventually became Owner UI, a shared library of tokens and primitives serving every surface instead of each platform drifting apart on its own.
Point of sale, kiosk and guest tablets
In the last six months I worked on the in-restaurant hardware surfaces: the point of sale, the self-serve kiosk, and the guest-facing tablet that pairs with the till.
Point of sale is unforgiving to design for. It is used one-handed, at speed, mid-conversation, by staff trained on it five minutes ago. Every screen has to survive a rush.
- POS depth — kitchen display and station routing, role-based access, cash drawers, tax handling and gift cards. The features that decide whether a restaurant can actually switch.
- Kiosk — v1.0, then a pay-screen redesign, onboarding and upsells.
- Guest tablet — the customer-facing screen paired to the POS, showing the guest only what they should see. A redesign put rewards and upsell in front of them at the moment they are already paying.
- Owner UI — the design system of tokens and primitives, and the first feature built on it: one order-details experience shared across app, web and POS.
- Full service — table service and post-order tipping, opening the product up beyond quick service.