Case study
Prepay × QikServe
Two ordering platforms fused into one after a merger, with both estates live throughout.
- Client
- QikServe
- Role
- Head of Product Design
- Timeframe
- 2021–2022
- Sector
- Hospitality technology
- live estates kept serving throughout
- 2
- operator downtime during migration
- 0
- converged platform at the end
- 1
Two products, one future
Mergers get told as commercial stories. Inside the product they're design problems: two ordering platforms, two codebases, overlapping features with different opinions, and customers on both sides who chose the product they already had and rather liked it.
Through 2021 and 2022 I led the design side of merging the Prepay and QikServe product lines into one. The constraint that shaped everything: both platforms had to keep serving live operators throughout. There was no pause button, no freeze window, no quiet season to hide the work in.
The audit nobody enjoys
We started with an honest audit of both estates, pattern by pattern. Where did the products genuinely differ? Where did they differ only by accident of history? And which experience deserved to survive? Honest is the hard word in that sentence. Every pattern had an author, and some of the authors were in the room.
The audit produced something neither company had owned before: a full map of what the combined product actually was. Plenty of supposed differentiators turned out to be the same idea in different clothes, and a few quiet features turned out to be the real crown jewels.
Rules of convergence
We converged by rules rather than by taste, because rules can be argued about in advance and taste gets argued about forever.
- Evidence beats authorship: the surviving pattern was the one performing better for guests and operators, wherever it came from
- Every decision shipped with a migration path, never a decree
- Accidental differences merged immediately; genuine product differences earned a documented exception
- Customers heard about changes before the changes arrived, every time
In a merger, the design system is the diplomacy.
Team and credits
Convergence was a whole-company project wearing a design badge.
- Design colleagues from both product lines, who merged patterns they'd often originally built, which takes a particular grace
- Engineering teams on both codebases, who carried the migration without dropping live service
- Product management, who sequenced convergence around operator realities rather than internal tidiness
- Customer success, who carried the message out to customers and carried their reactions back to us
What it taught me
The merged experience became the foundation the later platform work stood on, including the Evo system at Access. None of that happens if the merger calcifies into two camps maintaining two of everything.
It also taught me where a merger actually becomes real. Org charts merge on day one. Products merge when two teams agree on what a button means, and someone has to design the room where that agreement can happen. That room was the most important artefact I made in those two years.