Disrupt or Innovate. You can't do both.
One breaks the system and one builds it better. Knowing the difference will help the team succeed.
At Sonic Drive-In, we reimagined the customer experience across 3,600 locations. That meant threading innovation into something already beloved. If we moved too fast, we’d lose the soul of what made Sonic, well, Sonic. If we moved too slowly, we’d stay stuck in a 1990s loop, trying to innovate with one hand tied behind our backs. The innovation required some disruption, but mostly it required tactical innovation from each department: Marketing, IT, Delivery, Product, HR, Legal, Franchise Relations, and Operations.
That balance between disruption and innovation is where great products live.
Disruption means burning it down and starting from scratch. It’s cheaper, faster, and unconstrained by legacy systems. No integrations. No baggage.
Innovation, on the other hand, is expensive. It requires a deep understanding of what’s already there, including legacy codebases, outdated infrastructure, and interdepartmental dependencies. It means managing both operational realities and research and development teams.
One clears the path and starts anew… The other manages the renovation of the path with multiple stakeholders and many opinions.
This balance was especially true when I re-entered the FinTech sector to lead a team building an AI/ML-powered banking app designed to help users feel in control of their money.
Our goal was simple but radical: financial health is a lot like physical fitness. We wanted to utilize behavioral science to motivate, celebrate, and nudge individuals toward healthier habits. To do this, we built a gamified savings system that made savings goals feel achievable and spending habits more accessible. The project as a whole had the goal of creating a seamless user onboarding experience and a more transparent transaction process. It wasn’t a disruption of the user experience, per se, but it was a disruption of the systems and processes within the bank to achieve the seamless nature of the experience.
Banks as a whole offload the friction to the user. Friction is a way to slow a process and deter fraudulent activity. But in a world of bots and bot farms, these deterents are no longer viable. As fraudsters could code an RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to jump right over or through any gate presented by the experience.
Post-COVID, especially, the added friction was no longer a deterrent but a liability. This is where we met our fork in the road. Were we disrupting or innovating? Our team was in some ways pointed along the path of disruption, but finding friction with each step. Maybe said another way, we wanted to tear it down and start afresh to create a seamless experience with strategic friction. But soon realized the legacy systems, processes, and people did not want to be left out of the solution. While we were tasked with disruption, we were only able to accomplish innovation within the existing structures.
When you disrupt, you have the opportunity to create a seamless user experience for both the end user and the operators who must manage the growth. When you innovate, you often introduce friction for both the users and the operators, as you tackle integrations, onboarding, workflows, and data needs on a department-by-department cadence. Innovation then comes with a larger cost of relational capital, as you must try and delicately manage the priorities on both sides of the experience. Done well, innovation includes managing the interplay between the artists and the operators by ensuring a healthy transfer of ideas between the two.
This is not easy.
Nonetheless, the importance of facilitating innovation without compromising execution has to be prioritized and managed from the top down; otherwise, fiefdoms and territorial boundary wars will soon bog down any potential progress.
Examples from a couple of different use cases might be of use here.
At the bank, we wanted to introduce a more seamless user experience where decisions and fraud checks were done below the surface of the experience. Which would create a seamless experience to a real human, while introducing friction to the more suspicious actors, human or bot. If we built that product without including the fraud team in the discovery, it could be seen as an automation of their work and be taken as a threat to their teams, territory, and livelihood.
So, we included the Fraud and Operations team throughout every step of the process. Knowing we would not be successful if we fully automated, nor would it be compliant with OCC guidelines. We could not disrupt; we had to innovate towards a solution with our partners.
At Sonic, we did this backwards… I was shortsighted in my strategy, focused on delivery over everything else, which backfired heroically. It has become one of the best learning moments of my career.
During the order ahead project, we steamed ahead with a solution to notify the back kitchen of new orders, understanding the technical implementation of the innovation via the documentation, training material, and playbook on operations. We built a seamless experience, in which the user would order, and as they drove to the location, we would automatically fire the order into the kitchen when they entered a geofenced area around the Sonic location (larger geofence for Sonic’s right off the highway, and smaller for neighborhood Sonic’s with stoplights and stopsigns). Patting ourselves for this seamless solution, we were quite surprised when, in testing, the orders took longer than a normal order would take.
Too Magical?!?
We thought we had built a magical solution that would both delight the customer and optimize the delivery and preparation of the order. But our solution was too frictionless, too magical, as the order disappeared within the back kitchen operations. We had failed to adequately understand the process. We had offered a disruptive solution when we should have been more collaborative in our innovation. In this case, friction was necessary. The kitchen is a busy place with many different flows and processes outside of the digital experience. So, we took a step back, began a more intrusive relationship with our operators, and discovered our miss was putting our operators at a disadvantage, as they are rated based on time to delivery scores, which creates a situation in which things are sometimes gamed within the back kitchen… I’m not trying to be a Narc here, but it’s important to understand that the process on paper is not always the process followed. Our solution was right on paper, but not right when we realized how orders are processed through the system. This “Aha!” moment was pivotal in shifting how we fired Order Ahead orders through the system. Our magical experience had to be demystified; we had to add friction to the user’s experience as well as the operators.
The solution was simplified on the technology side and made more complex on the user side. Orders were no longer magically fired into the system; the user instead had to check into a stall to fire the order, thereby putting them in the right order for the back kitchen staff to prioritize.
When orders were fired, we had to initiate a sound in the back kitchen. It was just too quiet, and with no one person in charge of the order from taking it to delivering it, operations had to assign carhops to listen for the “DING!” and know that an order had been placed, in which they then had to find the stall and move the order through the process. If we were disrupting… we would have stayed with the magical experience. But we weren’t disrupting, we were innovating, and innovation requires collaboration, integration, friction, and compromise.
In Summary
Disruption is exciting. It’s clean. But most product teams don’t live in a greenfield or blue-sky environment. They’re working inside legacy systems, navigating compliance requirements, managing stakeholder tensions, and bumping up against old habits that don’t die easily. Innovation is messier. It demands more from every team involved; more trust, more humility, more patience, and less ego. This is where real progress is made, not because you burned it all down, but because you persisted, worked through the friction, and built something better.
Together.