Strategy you can measure.

Where it began

I walked into Agilysys in August 2017 and looked at the product portfolio for the first time. Property Management. Point of Sale. Inventory. Spa. Golf. Booking. Kiosks. Mobile. A whole ecosystem of enterprise hospitality software — each built independently, each behaving differently, each carrying years of legacy complexity. The mandate was to modernise everything for the cloud. What nobody had mapped out was how to do that across fifteen-plus products without creating fifteen-plus versions of the same problem.

The problem nobody had named

The real problem was not the legacy technology — that was solvable. The deeper problem was that there was no shared foundation. No common visual language, no shared components, no consistent interaction patterns. A user moving from the front desk PMS to the spa booking system felt like they had switched companies. The learning curve reset every time. The brand trust eroded every time. Something foundational had to be built — not another redesigned screen. A system.

How I built it

The first version was built in Adobe XD — manually created design library files shared between designers as the team grew. As we scaled we moved to Figma, and everything changed: tokens for colour, type, spacing, and component states could be published and consumed in real time by every designer and developer simultaneously. The system became live infrastructure, not a shared document.

Architecture followed the user

The most important decision: the system could not be one-size-fits-all. PMS users navigate deep workflows at a desk. POS users are on their feet making fast decisions. Inventory users move through dense, menu-heavy screens. So shared foundations went where users were the same, and dedicated libraries where they were not. Three versions followed — V1 modernised the foundation, V2 was rebuilt from FullStory behavioural evidence, and V3 tightened everything into one responsive grid system across all products.

Earning adoption one team at a time

Getting fifteen-plus product teams onto a single system was the hardest part of the eight years — not technically, organisationally. I made the case with business arguments, not design ones: faster delivery, lower QA costs, less designer effort, products that were easier to sell. No team was ever forced to adopt. They were shown why it worked — and they chose to.

When a design system works the way it should, people stop talking about design. And start talking about what the product actually does.

Where it began

A company's website is its first handshake with the world. For a hospitality technology company selling to Marriott, Hilton, and Mandarin Oriental, that handshake has to be confident, clear, and credible. Agilysys.com had aged — the design no longer reflected the sophistication of the products behind it, the navigation wasn't organised the way a visitor thinks, and the calls to action weren't converting. Something had to change, and I was the one to change it.

My role

As Design Head I owned this project completely — UX strategy, information architecture, visual design, the Figma component system, WordPress front-end, back-end PHP, code security review, and final delivery. Two WordPress developers assisted with hands-on coding; I directed every decision.

Components first

Every page was designed in Figma with a components-first approach — buttons, cards, headers, footers, CTAs, content blocks all built as reusable components from the start. The result was a library of 100+ widgets: modular content blocks that could be mixed, matched, and deployed across any page without breaking the visual system. Figma Dev Mode handed pixel-accurate specs straight to developers — what I designed is what got built.

Full-stack, front to back

The front end was built on HTML5 and Tailwind for a clean, maintainable codebase with semantic structure. On the back end, I directed the PHP developers — custom WordPress theme architecture, widget development, template logic, CMS configuration. Every widget was engineered for cross-page reusability so the content team could build new pages without touching a line of code.

Security, non-negotiable

WordPress is the world's most targeted CMS. Every line of code was scrutinised for vulnerabilities and the site was cleared by internal InfoSec before a single page went live. Agilysys.com has been maintained on WordPress for more than five years — without a single breach. That record didn't happen by accident.

Most design leaders at Director level direct, review, and approve. I did all of that — and then opened Figma and designed every page myself, directed the PHP developers, and shipped a production website the company's most senior leaders stood up and noticed.

Where it began

Late 2017. I had just joined and the first project landed on my desk — a restaurant waitlist and table reservation product called SEAT, later evolved into Reserve. I sat with the founders, listened deeply, and designed for the person at the front of a full restaurant on a Saturday night — not for the specification document. That first project set the standard for everything that followed.

The scale of what came next

Reserve was just the beginning. Agilysys Spa — a cloud platform with a booking wizard showing pricing, duration, and availability in one view. Agilysys Golf — live tee sheets that, at Pinehurst, cut phone traffic significantly. Eatec, the most complex product I have ever worked on — inventory and procurement with the visual language of an old MS Access database, transformed into a modern SaaS platform without losing a single function users depended on. And VERSA — the flagship PMS, reimagined from the legacy Visual One .NET system into a next-generation cloud platform with mobile-first workflows and intelligent guest profiles.

Speed under pressure

InfoGenesis POS is used by people under relentless pressure — servers during a peak dinner service, bartenders at a high-volume casino bar, cashiers in a stadium outlet. The interface has to be fast, intuitive, and error-tolerant. We redesigned it with a role-appropriate interface that reduced training time and improved service speed, plus offline resiliency so transactions keep flowing during network disruptions. Alongside it, IG Kiosk — the guest-facing self-service experience — drove 10–15% increases in average check value and up to 30% faster order processing.

The users behind every decision

The real users of Agilysys software are not in comfortable offices. They are front desk agents checking in guests, servers on their feet all evening, spa therapists moving between rooms, golf operators managing tournaments, purchasing managers running food-cost reports at the end of a long shift. Every design decision was tested against one question: does this make their job easier? If it did not — it did not ship.

How we worked

Every product followed the same disciplined process with User and Context Analysis at the core. Discovery began with stakeholder sessions; research followed with interviews, contextual observation, and usability testing; designs were built in Figma with multiple options per submission, reviewed, iterated, and tracked. Multiple products ran simultaneously, with limited resources and real deadlines. Not a single project timeline missed.

Hospitality runs on how people feel. I spent eight years making the software behind that feeling better — across one of the most complex product portfolios in the industry. Real products. Real users. Real impact, every single day.