How Software Developers Learned from the Food Service Industry

March 2, 2016

We had a kind of odd Leap Day celebration this year at OST – we ran a one-day-only pop-up restaurant from within our headquarters in Grand Rapids. I know what you’re thinking: “Wait, what?” I’ll say it again. We served breakfast and lunch to nearly 80 customers, including a Rice Krispy-crusted French toast, an eggplant, squash and zucchini tower, and perhaps the fanciest lasagna roulades I’ve ever seen.

Why would a technology firm spend the last Monday of the month running a restaurant? It’s a fair question, and something I spent a lot of time thinking about as I stood in our lobby, decked out in my Café OST t-shirt and seating guests and clearing tables.

Here, then, are the three most obvious lessons learned:

We succeed and fail together. Whether you’re taking orders, plating lunches, running food, or clearing tables, you can’t run a restaurant without counting on the rest of the team to support you. What would happen if, every time a customer gave an order to the waiter, your waiter said, “I can’t cook that, so I don’t know what you’re going to get.”

It’s true, though. Your waiter isn’t going to cook your lunch, but they are trusting that the kitchen staff will, and that trust is so strong that they make recommendations, take our orders, and never hint that there is any chance that things won’t go exactly as planned.

Is that dishonest? Is it wrong that I’m confirming details that are outside of my control? Absolutely not. It’s essential to our success. As a team, each of us has unique abilities and responsibilities, and we’re trusting on each member of the team to fulfill their role. The sales team can’t write code, and the delivery team isn’t responsible for selling; but without the two working together, trusting that they can do their jobs, we’d all be out of work. Whether your work is in a restaurant or you’re part of a complex software delivery team, whether you realize it or not, we succeed and fail together.

Details matter. One of our customers today had a silverware roll that was missing a fork. Something as simple as a fork has the ability to define or deny a customer an enjoyable experience. How can I eat a salad – even the best salad in the world – without a fork? I can’t. Paying attention to those details, working to ensure that no detail is overlooked and that nothing is taken for granted – that’s the most basic building block of successful service.

I don’t make forks. I wasn’t even responsible for forks today. I’m not even sure that I know where the forks were kept – but I know that forks matter. And I was on the lookout, every time we reset a table for the rest of the day – to ensure everyone had a fork. We each have our individual roles and responsibilities, but we’re all responsible for quality control. They say the devil is in the details – the details matter, and it’s everyone’s job to keep them in focus if our goal is to deliver quality.

Service is service. Whether you’re waiting tables, baking quiches, or plating lunches, you’re in service. Whether we’re writing code, configuring RAID arrays, updating a virtual environment or providing strategic assessments, you’re in service. Whether we think of it that way or not, we’re a service provider, and our (unspoken) commitment to all of our clients is the exact same in our real lives as it was in Café OST today – to deliver exceptional service.

We have the luxury as consultants to define our customers’ expectations. Then we get the pleasure of delivering on those expectations. That contract defines what we do, and defines everything we do in the service industry. I am proud to have dedicated my life to the service industry, and thankful that I got to spend the day reminding myself of this.

I’m thankful that I work for a company where we’re granted that luxury to learn. There is so much to do, and only so many hours in a month – how great is it to have been given the grace to spend a whole day of that time focusing my energy on the core of what we do?

Here’s my call to action for you: Find the time. Every moment you spend learning is a moment that will reward you tenfold. Every minute you spend exploring why you do what you do is a minute that will color all the minutes that follow it.

Your order is in the window.

Eat up, while the plate’s still hot.