Respond, React & Adapt: Tech Transformation at McDonald's with Phil Le-Brun
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Who is Phil Le‑Brun and what is his background before joining AWS?
I think many companies talk about doing agile, but to be agile is really a culture change. They truly believe a combination of an agile modern culture with agile modern technology, you can change the world. I'm Jason
Richards. I'm the head of portfolio technology and cybersecurity here at HG. I'd like to welcome you to the HG podcast series, where we're speaking to leaders across the world of technology. One such leader who joined us at our HG Tech Summit recently is Phil LeBrum. Hey Phil, how are you doing?
Hey Jason. Thank you for having me.
If you don't mind, it'd be great, Phil, if you could just give a brief introduction of yourself and perhaps a little bit of your background.
Sure. So I'm based in the UK and I I spent a long time at McDonald's, both in line of business roles in the US, Europe, and the UK. And then for many years in corporate roles based in Chicago and Europe. I had a wonderful career there with incredible people transforming the organization with technology. My last two roles were as international CIO and then leading the global development data supply chain and innovation technology teams as McDonald's transformed into a digitally enabled company. I describe myself as an engineer by training, a technologist by profession, and a psychologist out of necessity. Uh subsequently I joined AWS about 18 months ago as an enterprise strategist. I work with 14 colleagues around the world who are former CIOs and CTOs from companies as diverse as Capital One, Coca-Cola, Airbus, Live Nation, Foundation Medicine, and the US government.
And in these roles, we help AWS customers with their own transformations.
The journey at McDonald's, a digital transformation, an organization, the size and scale of McDonald's. I mean, that can't have been a a a quick and easy thing to do. If you could maybe just give us a bit of insight into that journey, you know, that whole transition and move to the world of digital, the world of SaaS.
Sure, it's it was an interesting journey. And as you uh mentioned, it took a long time. Uh McDonald's was historically very decentralized, very limited use of technology. If the technology stopped working in the restaurants, business went on, but it's very different now. Um, technology became increasingly as important as McDonald's grew.
How did McDonald’s transition from a decentralized, low‑tech operation to a digital‑first enterprise?
Um and today thirty-eight thousand restaurants across a hundred and twenty countries makes for a very complex system. Uh what I'm proud of is if you look across the restaurants, they're all running the same point of sale system, basically the heart of the restaurant. And our first foray into an internal SAS. Was a solution to manage that point of sale. Master data such as opening hours and menu items and taxes and the such like, once you dive behind the curtain, there's a level of complexity there, which most people don't recognize, different fiscal legislation, uh, the variety of menu items and the different options on what you can take off or add on to a particular sandwich. And you know, we moved to SaaS very deliberately.
We needed the elasticity, both in terms of scale and cost. You never knew if knew if one customer was going to use something tomorrow or a million customers. Um, but we also wanted to have our folks. Um, focus on the things which really differentiated McDonald's. Um, most of our internal customers wanted to use this technology. They didn't want to worry about the technology, they just wanted the outcome from that technology, so something they could consume. And more recently in 2017, that was a big year for us. We launched an e-commerce SaaS across 20,000 restaurants, enabling customers to uh order and pick up uh using their mobile phone. We launched delivery that was less than four months. We had a delivery service up and running globally, accessible to 8,000 restaurants.
And that subsequently became a four billion dollar business. And again, that ability to scale up and scale down based on consumer demand was massive. And you know, I think many companies have found this over the past year with COVID, this ability to scale up and scale down your service as a consequence of an event, a crisis, or even just changes in business demand were incredibly powerful for McDonald's.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Phil Le‑Brun and what is his background before joining AWS?
0:02–2:17
2
How did McDonald’s transition from a decentralized, low‑tech operation to a digital‑first enterprise?
2:17–4:58
3
Why did McDonald’s choose a SaaS model and what benefits did elasticity bring?
4:58–7:30
4
What was the bold 20,000‑restaurant e‑commerce goal and how did it drive cultural change?
7:30–10:06
5
How did small, empowered “two‑pizza” teams enable rapid delivery and ownership?
10:06–12:38
6
Why is building a culture of empathy and trust more important than technology alone?
12:38–14:41
7
How does the “working backwards” approach keep the customer at the center of innovation?
14:41–16:54
8
What lessons from McDonald’s transformation does Phil bring to his role at AWS today?
16:54–19:27
Speakers
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