Tech Leadership and the Indelible Stamp of Restaurant Life
Before the start of my career in technology, and for a period of time after it started, I worked in restaurants. I never worked anyplace that was particularly high-end - mostly chain restaurants with a couple of mid-tier independents thrown in. At one time or another, I did pretty much anything one could do in a restaurant - back-of-house, front-of-house, tending bar, server, busser, cook - I was even a meatcutter for a while. Eventually, I began to run them. In that capacity, I was responsible for ordering food and equipment, making schedules, doing financials, analyzing nightly performance, setting prep levels, running shifts, and a lot of other things that I am forgetting after so much time.
I have often said, especially after my tech career began to gravitate towards leadership roles, that my time in restaurants has been more informative and applicable than most other experiences I’ve had. A well-run kitchen is a microcosm of many concepts that apply in effective tech organizations. The first is processes and procedures. In both environments, process needs to be well-documented, well-trained, and well-executed for success. For example, I worked in one restaurant that made everything fresh daily. Because of this, one of the first things that was prepped every day was pico de gallo. Each morning, it began as whole tomatoes, whole onions, uncut cilantro, whole lemons, and so on.
The quality expectations meant that the pico had to be prepped early so it could properly macerate before the restaurant opened for lunch. To a customer, the pico was a minor accessory to the menu, and that customer would be correct. But the restaurant’s expectations in terms of quality of experience meant that even a minor accessory needed to be properly prepared because not doing so ran the risk of that accessory becoming a major distraction in terms of experience.
That brings me to a second similarity - a focus on quality experience. In tech, user experience (UX) is king. A lot of attention and innovation goes into designing the user experience so that a user’s interaction with technology is intuitive, productive, positive, and memorable. The experience keeps a user coming back and also increases the chance that they tell others. These concepts were central to the operation of every restaurant I ever worked in.
The cultures of a well-run restaurant and a well-run technology organization also value innovation. This may seem counterintuitive because I’ve just talked about process. There exists in many tech organizations a false dichotomy between process and innovation. Innovation is about trying new things and building differentiators - giving users or diners an experience they have never had before. The best organizations value innovation and prioritize it.
Process supports innovation by defining exactly how the innovation will be delivered to the customer to ensure that the customer has the expected experience. This last part is key because incredibly innovative technology or dishes can fall flat if attention is not paid to how they are delivered to the customer. This is where UX figures in. A well-executed technical UX leads a user through an optimal experience to achieve an expected outcome.
In a restaurant, the presentation of a dish is often central to how a diner experiences the flavor profile. The selection and placement of times on the plate, the use of drizzles under or on top of the dish, accent fruits or vegetables all play a role in how the dish is experienced, taking into account activation of different regions of the diner’s tongue and so on.
So innovation, creativity, design, technical prowess, and process are all essential to the function of a well-run technology organization as well as a well-run restaurant. The final factor that ties all of these together is leadership. We have all been to restaurants where the service was lackluster and the food uninspiring. Chain restaurants are interesting in this regard because one location can be quite average while another can leave you feeling like you had a good experience. Whether a chain or an independent, the difference between the ones you enjoy and those you don’t usually comes down to an owner or an executive chef or a manager who prioritizes and communicates an expectation of quality in all phases and can get their entire team to buy into that expectation.
The same is true in the technology world. The organizations that produce effective, high-quality, well-designed products and who support those products with proactive customer success - that actively lead their customers to an optimal experience - tend to have active, engaged leadership who communicate their expectations and get their teams to buy in. Organizations that think in terms of “management” and track things like burn-down charts and cycle time typically deliver lackluster products and have trouble retaining customers.
The farther I get away from that period in my life, the more my time in restaurants becomes a metaphor rather than something I can directly mine for experiences. But it remains a powerful metaphor and one I can use to compare and contrast as I continue to mature as a tech leader.