Jessa Parette
Head of Design, Byte by Yum! at Yum! Brands
- Episode
- 148
- Design Leader
- Jessa Parette
- Role
- Head of Design, Byte by Yum! at Yum! Brands
- Runtime
- 19:21
- Date Posted
- 8.30.26
- AI
- Leadership
- Strategy
Jessa Parette started in content and stumbled into UX the way most people do — by realizing the interesting problems lived there. Walmart is where she learned what scale actually means: she led associate digital design for a user base of 1.3 million people. Capital One followed, and today she's Head of Design for Byte by Yum!, the AI-driven platform behind Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell, and The Habit Burger Grill, owning the design system that sits under both the restaurant operations and the consumer-facing side. That vantage point shapes her core observation: the employee experience and the customer experience aren't separate lines. The person taking the order is delivering your loyalty program, and if it isn't understandable on both sides of the counter, it's broken.
The biggest shift she's watching is the move from responsive to anticipatory experiences — and her warning is that you can't make that jump without the prerequisites, a data strategy and a design system, that many organizations are only now scrambling to build. On consumer trust, she draws a line she thinks the industry keeps missing: separate personalization from presumption. People like technology anticipating their needs when it's useful and they understand why. They resist when the system knows something they didn't knowingly give it, or starts making choices on their behalf — and younger consumers, raised on algorithms, clock the moment personalization crosses into manipulation. The design question is no longer how much AI you can use. It's how much control the person still feels they have.
For her teams, she refuses to make AI the destination — that framing just manufactures anxiety. Instead she points designers at four skills that can't be automated: systems thinking, risk interpretation, org alignment, and ambiguity tolerance. AI productionalized the interface work that used to eat all the time; judgment is what's left, and it's becoming the most valuable design skill. Her advice to juniors follows directly — don't compete with AI on output, use it aggressively, and become the person who can look at a plausible generated answer and explain why it's wrong. And her method for the C-suite is the deepest cut in the episode: stop proving the value of design by talking about design. Translate it into deployment risk, adoption, dollars lost. Instrument the work, measure it, show the business consequence — done right, you'll barely use the word "design" at all.
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