MLB's product and strategy teams wanted to improve the food and beverage experience at ballparks. The working assumption was that speed was the problem — fans were waiting too long, and faster service would fix it. My job was to find out whether that was actually true, and what, if anything, the speed framing was missing.

The challenge wasn't just research. It was helping a major league organization loosen its grip on an assumption that felt obvious — and replace it with something more useful.

I spent time at four ballparks — Yankees Stadium, Citi Field, Daikin Park in Houston, and Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia — watching fans move through concourses, standing in lines, and talking to people mid-purchase. Not in a focus group. In the actual environment, during actual games.

That fieldwork was combined with large-scale fan surveys and in-depth one-on-one interviews. The goal was to get past what people say they want and understand what they're actually trying to accomplish at different moments in the ballpark experience.

The picture that emerged was more complicated than "fans want faster food." Fans aren't a single type of person making a single type of decision. Their behavior shifts depending on what they're trying to accomplish — and the concourse environment was actively working against some of those modes while supporting others.

The league had been organizing its thinking around speed. The research showed the bigger opportunity was confidence, autonomy, access, and hospitality. That's a fundamentally different design brief — and it changes what you invest in, how you lay out a space, how you train staff, and what information you surface and when.

A fan who doesn't know what's available, or doesn't know how long a line will take, doesn't just feel frustrated — they make a different decision. They go back to their seat. They miss their moment. Speed wasn't the problem. Information architecture was.

The findings shifted what the league decided to prioritize going into the next planning cycle — and they did it across all 30 teams.

MLB's product and strategy teams wanted to improve the food and beverage experience at ballparks. The working assumption was that speed was the problem — fans were waiting too long, and faster service would fix it. My job was to find out whether that was actually true, and what, if anything, the speed framing was missing.

The challenge wasn't just research. It was helping a major league organization loosen its grip on an assumption that felt obvious — and replace it with something more useful.

I spent time at four ballparks — Yankees Stadium, Citi Field, Daikin Park in Houston, and Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia — watching fans move through concourses, standing in lines, and talking to people mid-purchase. Not in a focus group. In the actual environment, during actual games.

That fieldwork was combined with large-scale fan surveys and in-depth one-on-one interviews. The goal was to get past what people say they want and understand what they're actually trying to accomplish at different moments in the ballpark experience.

The picture that emerged was more complicated than "fans want faster food." Fans aren't a single type of person making a single type of decision. Their behavior shifts depending on what they're trying to accomplish — and the concourse environment was actively working against some of those modes while supporting others.

The league had been organizing its thinking around speed. The research showed the bigger opportunity was confidence, autonomy, access, and hospitality. That's a fundamentally different design brief — and it changes what you invest in, how you lay out a space, how you train staff, and what information you surface and when.

A fan who doesn't know what's available, or doesn't know how long a line will take, doesn't just feel frustrated — they make a different decision. They go back to their seat. They miss their moment. Speed wasn't the problem. Information architecture was.

The findings shifted what the league decided to prioritize going into the next planning cycle — and they did it across all 30 teams.