Makers #2: Michael Tokoph & Nour Tabet | Huge

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Makers #2: Michael Tokoph & Nour Tabet

When they were first paired to work on McDonald’s, Nour and Michael lived in different parts of the country and had never been on the same project. Soon they were learning from each other and finding new ways of working.

Makers

José Simián

In this second installment of Makers, we brought together Creative Director Nour Tabet and Associate Director of Strategy Michael Tokoph, Hugers who met behind screens (she lives in Washington, DC while he’s in Chicago) after being paired to work on McDonald’s, a longstanding client of the agency that was undergoing organizational and strategic transformations.

The ice between the two of them was broken with a session that revolved around a simple question: How do you like to work? Their respective answers opened the gates for a collaboration —and professional friendship— that keeps inspiring them.

The Makers.

Nour Tabet: I’m a creative director, and I've been with Huge for 10 years. I started as a senior designer, and now I manage and run creative (as well as creative teams) for different clients. At McDonald's, I managed a team of about 11 creatives from visual design to UX, writing and design systems.

I like to work on projects that are at the intersection of culture and design, and have an affinity for designing for a global audience, perhaps because I lived in a bunch of different places growing up.

Michael Tokoph: I joined Huge in 2019 in our Chicago office (back when we had physical offices), and I’m on the Business Strategy & Data Consulting team. I started as a product manager and my background was really more technical (on the product management side), but I’ve grown into the strategy side of it.

I very much love numbers. My love language is spreadsheets, so I’ve always been really interested in clients that have really high volume and low price—where you can get massive scale. Everything just becomes so much more important. You can make very small tweaks to an experience, product or service, and have insanely outsized results from it.

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The work.

Huge’s engagement with McDonalds’ began in 2017, at a time when the company’s celebrated digital kiosks and mobile app were in early stages. In the following years, the agency designed a new service experience to drive efficiencies and increase revenue, created a centralized new design system for the brand, and developed an omni-channel approach to order placement. The results included making the McDonald’s app the most downloaded food and beverage one on the planet, and getting digital interactions to account for 40% of the company’s sales in 2023.

Michael was part of this journey from the get-go, joining the project in the early stages, while Nour took over the account’s creative leadership at the end of 2022.

Michael Tokoph: When we started working on the account in 2017, McDonald’s had just started to think about bringing transactions to their mobile app (which back then was just a collection of coupons, if you will). They had kiosks in the restaurants, but it wasn’t a unified experience across markets: they all looked and worked a little bit differently. So we came in and helped them become more cohesive and thoughtful across all their digital experiences. The work was centered around designing the screens and flows for the mobile app, for their website, and for the kiosks.

From a design standpoint, we had a design system that we brought and refreshed a couple of times. We also helped them launch their loyalty program, which was a big launch in the U.S., and is now in over 50 countries. And we made a lot of changes to their service model. You can see this now with their new sub-brand CosMc’s, which is very drive-thru oriented for the post-Covid world, with four drive-thru lanes. (We helped run a bunch of testing on how to use the mobile app to improve, not erode, the drive-thru experience. Just adding a few seconds to the experience on average would balloon their costs by 40 million dollars a month system-wide!)

Nour Tabet: When I joined, our relationship with McDonald’s digital team was at a tipping point. The organization was ready to build its own design capabilities internally so my challenge was to adapt the way we were working as well as our team structure. It was crucial to change our operating model in order to bring a different kind of value to the client, a value that was more strategic in nature, doubling down on discovery research, and setting the client up with the right skills and capabilities for their successful transformation. It was a very interesting challenge, especially when Huge was going through its own transformation as well.

To that point, what Michael and I worked on last year was mainly under the realm of design operations and building a healthy and happy environment—to set up McDonald’s to grow their design capabilities internally. It wasn’t only product work that we did. We also had to focus on what their new leadership cared about and then partner on ways we could show up to support these new goals, as good strategic thought leaders.

For example, when our clients began asking about generative AI we quickly introduced them to our AI SME Emily Wengert. Our ability to demonstrate expertise and share farsighted perspectives opened the door for ongoing collaborative workshops and subsequent thought leadership presentations. We set those up on a monthly basis to discuss various relevant design and tech topics, where we engaged in highly intellectual conversations about trends and important considerations in the industry. These sessions ultimately led to our involvement in a series of McDonald’s events that focused on socializing design as a capability, upskilling their team and also in a hackathon that we hosted at Dock 72!

For the hackathon, the aim was to simulate a product lifecycle in which McDonald’s product managers and technologists would get immersed in the design process. We worked on a fictional prompt around the McDonald’s loyalty program. Over three days, we observed a significant transformation in how the engineers approached their work. They moved away from a focus on rigid requirements and began to empathize with user problems and insights as a starting point instead. It was so nice to see our contribution to that—help shift the culture towards broader, user centric and innovative thinking.

The partnership.

Michael Tokoph:In the year and a half I got to work with Nour I learned so much—mostly about how to manage things at the account level. She reframed my perspective, from being an individual contributor to being able to set our team up for success.

For instance, we did a diary study for this project. But Nour made it so the whole team participated, putting ourselves in the shoes of the McDonald’s user. This experience gave us such a mountain of ideas to work on over the next couple of months, improvements, pain points… We had just so much better conversations even internally because we had that real first-hand experience that we could mutually compare.

Nour Tabet: We had a very nice partnership. I had never met Michael before and we met behind the screen, so it was naturally awkward at the beginning. But then we quickly found that nice chemistry and cadence on how to work together because we had a common goal: to make the client succeed in their vision with our help. And in the end, our partnership culminated in some very inspiring initiatives that we presented to the client.

One of the things that we worked on was a perspective on how to elevate their brand across their digital channels. That was a very cool challenge that we took on. We locked ourselves in a room all day, whiteboarding on how to map out all existing initiatives versus the creative ideas that our team was coming up with. I’ll always think fondly of that time, especially working remotely now—Michael and I just jamming in an (eventually stinky) room with post-its galore, putting together a story that weaves creative ideas into a strategic narrative.

Michael is a well of information. He really is! Whatever idea I have, he's able to match it to an insight that he's read or heard in the halls. He is always in the know of the latest updates on the business around the world.

What I most enjoyed working with Michael is that there are never any dead ends nor bad ideas. It's always a ping-pong of, “Hey, this is what I'm thinking. What do you think? Yeah, cool, I read this the other day that could help you. Maybe focus more on this, pull the brakes on that, etc.” Working with Michael always made me feel like I'm working towards a bigger picture.

As a creative, you always want to make something cool at the end of the day, but this approach brings meaning and purpose, and it’s a nice reminder for us creatives that our work doesn’t live in the ether. It's informed. So it was nice to be in a partnership that underscores that.

Michael Tokoph: I really appreciated that in the beginning we just had a really direct conversation around how we wanted to work together. And during our partnership, I always tried to be mindful of the fact that I had been on the account for so long, and we had tried and done different things. So when Nour came onboard with new perspectives, I was very aware of the difference between saying, “No, we've already done that, it's not going to work” versus, “This didn't work in the past, but I like your idea because it's a little bit different.”

I think it was about making sure to be very direct and confident about what you know to be true (and you have data to back it up), and being honest about what you don'tknow. Saying, “This is true. This is the data. But I have no idea what this other thing is. I need your help thinking about this.”

I'm now very excited to be able to work with Nour again in the future projects. I think there's an upcoming project that there's a possibility we're gonna work together on, and just knowing that makes me want to be here because I want to work with her again. She's a special one.

Nour Tabet:I know! Me too!It’s the best to be able to work with someone you have full trust in to speak your mind, to know that they’re going to hold you accountable nonetheless, but will not make you feel judged if you’re throwing random lame ideas… and if one day you just don’t feel inspired and need to take a break! So, cheers, Michael!