Next Gen App & Loyalty

Starbucks had long been a leader in mobile ordering, loyalty, and digital customer engagement. But the experience that once helped define the category was facing a new moment.

Customer expectations had accelerated, and the broader digital landscape had become more competitive. The digital platform needed to support a more personalized, seamless, and reliable future.

The ambition was clear: create a next-generation app and loyalty experience that could re-establish momentum and support the future of the business. But ambition alone was not enough. The organization needed a way to turn that vision into a structured, executable program.

This was not simply a digital product refresh. It was a complex transformation across product, technology, loyalty, marketing, design, and store operations.

The work required clarity across several layers at once:

• The future experience needed to be defined clearly enough for teams to align around it.
• Internal and external partners needed a shared model for how the work would get done.
• Decisions, dependencies, roles, and governance needed to be structured before execution could move with confidence.
• The organization needed to move quickly without creating more fragmentation.

The core challenge was turning a high-level transformation ambition into an operating reality.

Andrew led the front end of the transformation: shaping the vision, structuring the work, aligning stakeholders, and creating the conditions for execution.

His role included developing the strategic brief, guiding partner selection and onboarding, leading the initial dedicated cross-functional tiger team, and establishing the governance and operating model needed to move the program forward.

The work was then transitioned to a broader delivery organization, which continued the build and brought the customer-facing experience to market.

The engagement focused on moving the organization from strategic intent to executable structure.

The work included several essential moves:

• Define the future state. Inputs from across the business were synthesized into a clearer vision for the next-generation app and loyalty experience, giving teams a shared direction to build toward.
• Align the right stakeholders. Cross-functional conversations helped surface tensions, clarify priorities, and build alignment across product, technology, loyalty, marketing, design, and operations.
• Create the transformation brief. The work produced a clear strategic brief that translated ambition into a more actionable foundation for internal teams and external partners.
• Select and align the external partner. A structured partner selection process helped identify the right external partner and establish the basis for a productive working model.
• Stand up the operating model. Roles, decision rights, governance rhythms, dependencies, and team structures were clarified so the program could move forward with greater speed and accountability.
• Hand off with continuity. The final stage focused on ensuring that the broader team could own and extend the work, with enough structure, context, and alignment to carry it into delivery.

The work moved a complex transformation from executive ambition into an executable program.

Teams gained a clearer future-state vision, a shared strategic brief, a selected external partner, a dedicated cross-functional structure, and an operating model for continued execution.

The broader delivery organization carried that foundation forward, leading to the March 2026 launch of the next-generation app and loyalty experience.

What began as a high-stakes ambition became a structured path from strategy through delivery and into market.