About

Tillster powers enterprise-grade self-ordering experiences across mobile, web, and IoT kiosk platforms for global QSR brands including Burger King, Popeyes, Shake Shack, Roy Rogers, and Nathan’s Famous. As Senior Product Manager for our North America kiosk ecosystem, I lead product strategy and roadmap execution for a high-availability, AI-driven commerce platform supporting:

• 4M+ monthly users
• Live across multiple national QSR brands in North America
• 99.9% uptime across national deployments

My focus is building intelligent, reliable, edge-to-cloud systems that optimize conversion, increase basket size, and create scalable growth infrastructure for enterprise brands.

Challenge

Quick service restaurants operate in complex, real-time environments where:

• Menu, pricing, and promotions change dynamically
• POS and third party menu APIs must sync instantly or orders fail
• Loyalty and personalization require millisecond lookups
• Downtime directly impacts revenue

Prior to key platform improvements, kiosk ordering underperformed POS in both conversion and average check. Recommendations were static, system observability lacked clarity, and reliability improvements were reactive rather than predictive. The challenge was to transform the kiosk from a digital ordering screen into a high-performance AI-powered commerce engine.

Solution

1. AI-Driven Personalization

One of the main advantages of kiosk over POS is upsells and cross-sells, but our upsell prompts were static and leaving revenue on the table. I led the integration of Google Vertex AI affinity-based recommendation models into the kiosk ordering flow, partnering with data science to recommend products based on contextual signals and behavioral patterns.

• Replaced static upsell prompts with personalized recommendations across the two largest client deployments
• Achieved 14% higher average check compared to POS orders
  
• Designed recommendation surfaces directly into transactional flows to maximize relevance without increasing friction.

2. Real-Time IoT Hardware, and Cloud API Integrations

I also led development of real-time integrations across POS systems and third-party APIs to support:

• Instant menu and pricing synchronization
• Third-party loyalty API integrations for member lookup and rewards, including an on-kiosk Burger King loyalty sign-up that adds 6.4K new members per month
  
• Reliable order injection into POS
• Intelligent upsell timing within checkout flows

3. Reliability & Observability at Scale

Implemented a data-informed performance framework using:

• New Relic for system monitoring
• Snowflake Event Tables for behavioral tracking
  
• Looker for executive dashboards
• Amplitude for funnel analysis and experimentation

This enabled:

• 28% improvement in product stability
• 6% increase in conversion, backed by an A/B testing program that shipped Popular and New badges (+13% add-on take rate), a persistent cart (+10% checkout click rate), and a redesigned Popeyes homepage (+7% category click rate)
  
• Gave increased visibility into points of failure across the ecosystem including payment integrations, third party APIs, and POS failures

Overall these improvements helped move the organization from reactive debugging to proactive, data-driven optimization.

4. Enterprise Roadmap Leadership

Partnered directly with global brand stakeholders to define quarterly roadmaps aligned to acquisition, conversion, and revenue targets.Communicated complex technical trade-offs and AI strategy to senior leadership, engineering, operations, and data science teams, ensuring alignment across cross-functional domains in Agile sprint cycles.

Results

Conclusion

At Tillster, I turn self-service kiosks from transactional interfaces into intelligent, AI-powered commerce platforms.

By combining machine learning, edge-device reliability, real-time integrations, and experimentation-driven growth, I help enterprise brands unlock measurable revenue lift at national scale.