Turning a contractual obligation into a product — on a platform that couldn’t move fast.

MyNCR existed because McDonald’s required it. When NCR won the McDonald’s account, a contract provision mandated a digital self-service portal for order management. NCR built one. Then, because a working portal turned out to be something customers valued, leadership expanded it — not on the strength of a product strategy, but because the logic seemed apparent enough that no one pushed back.

The result grew without intention. No one with a product perspective owned the roadmap; it was shaped by whoever made the loudest request. Sales negotiated features into contracts and handed them over as requirements with no discovery. Bugs surfaced and forced their way over planned work. Customer service kept a long list of pain points that rarely became fixes, because the path to getting IT to act on them was unclear. What came out was a portal that functioned the way anything built from reactive patches functions — barely, and not for everyone.

The platform made it harder. MyNCR ran on Oracle ATG — a legacy commerce system with 50+ downstream integrations into ERP, Salesforce, billing, pricing, and fulfillment. IT governance classified it PLATINUM, the highest criticality tier, because a production incident could cascade into billing failures and account problems. Every change required rigorous review. You couldn’t move fast, and that amplified the reactive roadmap: by the time a bug-driven priority cleared review and shipped, the planned work behind it had slipped another quarter.

Getting the roadmap under control meant building a shared, cross-functional understanding of what MyNCR was actually for. I worked alongside IT, customer-service management, and finance to develop a coherent product vision — what the portal needed to do for the users who were on it, not the ones sales had hypothetically promised something.

The findings weren’t surprising once you looked. The customers on MyNCR were trying to do two things: pay invoices and manage equipment orders. The portal could technically do both, but the paths were unintuitive. Invoice payment took too many steps and gave too little visibility into account standing. Autopay existed but was buried. Onboarding was manual enough on both sides that large customers sat in a partial state for weeks — technically enrolled, practically unusable — which drove service volume and eroded confidence in the tool.

The friction wasn’t a single thing; it was the accumulated result of a portal extended rather than designed. The path forward was to stop patching and redesign the experiences users relied on most — payments, account visibility, onboarding — while building the business case to fund that work properly. That case was made twice: a $1M capital proposal in 2020, co-developed with the Hospitality GM as executive sponsor; and a second $1.05M Marketing Enablement case in 2022 covering UX modernization, analytics consolidation, onboarding, invoice visibility, and autopay.

The work centered on three areas: onboarding, payments UX, and autopay enrollment. Onboarding was redesigned to cut the manual steps needed to get an account operational, with a customer onboarding wizard that guided new accounts through setup instead of routing everything through customer service. Payments was redesigned for clarity — statement-of-account visibility, invoice history, and a flow that surfaced what users needed without forcing them through a legacy interface never built with them in mind. Autopay was surfaced properly and made intuitive enough to complete without a support escalation.

Throughout, the PLATINUM classification meant every release was heavily scrutinized. That constraint made stakeholder alignment more important than the technical work itself — IT, finance, and customer service had to agree on what was shipping and why, or nothing moved. The cross-functional roadmap process we’d built to support the business cases became the mechanism for holding that alignment through delivery.

When NCR split into NCR Atleos and NCR Voyix in 2023, MyNCR carried through the spinoff as the NCR Atleos Customer Portal. The product work from the NCR Corporation period was the foundation the new company’s portal launched on.

The deeper outcome was structural: a sales-driven, bug-chasing backlog replaced by a cross-functional product process aligned to user outcomes — built collaboratively with IT, customer service, and finance, funded twice on the strength of user-centered rationale, and durable enough to carry MyNCR through a corporate separation intact.