In this episode of The Optimal Path, Jehad Affoneh joins host Ash Oliver to discuss what it means to be customer-centric at Toast, the difference between being design-led and experience-led, and the role of UX research in shaping customer-centric cultures and experiences.
In this episode of The Optimal Path, Jehad Affoneh joins host Ash Oliver to discuss what it means to be customer-centric at Toast, the difference between being design-led and experience-led, and the role of UX research in shaping customer-centric cultures and experiences.
The conversation covers cultural shifts towards empathy and curiosity, mechanisms to foster a customer-centric culture, and how Toast integrates research into everyday operations. Discover how Toast encourages everyone across the company to consistently engage with customers and empowers them with easy-to-use methods to make these interactions more effective—ultimately driving better outcomes for customers, the business, and the team.
About Jehad:
Jehad is a design and product leader who's led design, product, and engineering teams most recently at VMware and Splunk. He is currently Chief Design Officer at Toast where he leads the product, customer, and end-to-end experience that empowers tens of thousands of restaurants to delight their guests, do what they love, and thrive. He lives with his wife and one year old son in Redwood City, California.
Connect with Jehad:
You can connect with Jehad on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaffoneh/
Or on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaffoneh
Or check out his articles here: https://www.mynameisjehad.com/
Resources:
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Ash Oliver:
What does it really take to become a customer-centric company? Many have asserted its importance, but achieving it requires making customer understanding one of the most valuable assets.
Jehad Affoneh:
If you think about really complex cross-functional, impactful problems, there's a ton of work in understanding where the fragmentation in the journey is in order to look at that journey and defragment it. And understanding the fragmentation of the journey requires really mature research work where research is deeply ingrained in the whole end-to-end process.
Ash Oliver:
Today on The Optimal Path, we're discussing what it means to be an experience-led organization and the role of user research in shaping customer-centric cultures.
I'm Ash Oliver, and this is The Optimal Path, a podcast about user research and product decision-making brought to you by Maze. Our guest is Jehad Affoneh. Jehad has formerly led design, product, and engineering teams at VMware and Splunk. He's now the chief design officer at Toast where he leads the end-to-end experience that empowers tens of thousands of restaurants to delight their guests, do what they love, and thrive. Really happy to have you on, Jehad. Thanks for being here.
Jehad Affoneh:
Thanks for having me. Excited to chat.
Ash Oliver:
We're going to be looking at UX research and product decisions inside of customer-centric organizations and the difference between design-led and experience-led organizations, and I'm really excited to have you share your point of view on the topic. I thought we could start by talking a bit about what customer-centricity means at Toast. And since Toast is really considered a very customer-focused organization, I'd love to know how this is emulated across the company culture and how that's brought into the design and research organization.
Jehad Affoneh:
I think we're really lucky at Toast to be in an industry that's centered around hospitality. Our mission is really grounded in our customers and our community. Our mission is to help the rest of our community delight their guests, do what they love, and thrive, which is a really cool mission if you think about it because it's centered around two levels of hospitality or two levels of customer-centricity, the restaurants' customer-centricity to their guest and then to the restaurant. Our number one value is we're all in customer success, so it's really hard to get away from being customer-centric at Toast. And it's driven by this idea that it's one of those businesses where all of us go eat out. All of us are able to chat with a server or a restaurant owner or operator. And once they know you're from Toast, they want to share feedback with you. It's that type of community, which is awesome.
It's really ingrained into who we are, and a big percentage of Toasters have actually worked at restaurants during their lifetime, either waiters or waitresses at restaurants, either worked in the kitchen or the back office or they help the operators or they come from restaurant families that have operated restaurants before. So it's really ingrained in who we are. And I think it's also a reminder that being close to customers or the proximity to customers just by being part of the industry is not enough to make you an experience-led or a truly customer-centric company. It takes a lot of intentionality to truly actually understand customers, the wide range of customers, and to truly dig deeper into their needs and translate that into products and experiences.
When we talk about customer-centricity, one of the examples we always go to is are you talking to the customers you have proximity to or are you actually talking to the customers that are representative of the population of customers on Toast? For example, I'm in the Bay Area. I probably talk to customers many times a week in person, just go to a restaurant, have a conversation, whether because you're eating dinner or lunch there or whether because you stop by because you saw Toast and have a conversation. But obviously Bay Area is not a representation of the rest of the country. So even though I'm being very customer-centric in my conversation, it's probably not as intentional as it needs to be. So I'm intentional about actually having conversations every week with restaurants across the country and to fly into places where the industry may take a different shape than the places around me.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. I love the meta layers that are there, that hospitality is such a core tenet of the company, that there's the translation into how that extends from Toast to your customers and then from the Toast customers into their guest. I would love to have you differentiate between being design-led and experience-led and how that manifests in its approach to product development, which you're talking about here sometimes terms I see being used synonymously, design-led, experience-led, customer-centric. So I'd love to have your point of view on how you differentiate between those.
Jehad Affoneh:
I think most people here design-led as function-led, so the design function. That's partially because of the terminology we use in companies where design is a function, but also partially because it's the design team that's often pushing for a design-led company. And in many times, design-led is a reaction to the company being engineering-led or product-led or go-to-market-led, whatever, the other part, which is also in many cases a function-led story. If you look at the experience-led, I think it's important for design teams to separate themselves from the experience in a way by understanding and acknowledging that everybody in the company owns a portion of the customer or product experience. If you think about Toast, for example, when we do onboarding, onboarding experience is owned by the sales team who starts that process most of the time, by the marketing team that starts before you get to Toast by the onboarding consultant, by the customer care teams that chat with customers, by the install team.
The experience may be designed by a design team or by a customer experience team, but regardless, the actual experience that customers feel is influenced by many, many different departments and teams at Toast. And if you think about it that way, experience is owned by everybody, and being an experienced-led company is less about the function and more about the end outcome, so less about who takes the leadership position in defining things and more about what kind of outcomes we want to deliver to our customers. That differentiation makes all the difference for teams across the company that can now be joint co-owners of raising the bar for outcomes versus followers for a function that wants to lead the definition.
If you're a joint owner of the outcomes, then you're able to participate in the definition. You're able to respond to it. You're able to influence it. You're an owner. You're motivated by it. You're empowered to do it. If you're a follower of a function-led story, then your job is to execute on these tasks, which is not a very empowering or exciting job. So I think if you're a design team or a research team, one of the most powerful things you can do is define experience as something that everybody owns, help influence that experience of course, but give the company the terminology, the tools, the mechanisms to become more experienced-led, and celebrate experiences that are done really well, especially outside of design.
Ash Oliver:
I love the differentiation there. It's so clear through being experienced-led that you're able to look at this from a holistic point of view and that the approach that's brought into each function, whether it be sales or customer support or research or design, is all driving towards the same ambition. Customer-centricity though often requires a cultural shift, especially within organizations that may not have the kind of history of being customer-centric. How does Toast foster this culture of prioritizing empathy and curiosity and customer understanding? Since you are the chief design officer, I'll ask you specifically within how that manifests in your day-to-day operations within that part of the organization.
Jehad Affoneh:
There are multiple aspects to this. One is how do you drive a culture that's more experience-led or customer-centric? One is how do you give the mechanisms to make sure that the pieces of that culture actually translate into action, and then how do you measure and iterate and improve? One of my favorite quotes that I have heard at Toast and I live by is, "Intentions don't scale. Mechanisms do." And we look at this often of well-intentioned people do awesome work, but often that work doesn't scale when you want it to become a truly operationalized part of the culture. So it's important to recognize good intentions. It's important to actually look at them and understand and learn from them. But if you want them to scale, you need to put mechanisms around them that actually translate into a 5,000 people org rowing the same direction.
If you take Toast aside for just a minute, I think the way you transform a culture into a customer-centric culture really depends on the stage of maturity a company is in. For example, if you're a company that's so ingrained in prioritizing business results, you're really not customer-centric at all, your job is fully focused on profits at the end of every quarter, then your approach may be different than a company like Toast where customer-centricity is core to our mission, customer-centricity is part of the overall lingo, but our mechanisms can always improve. It's really deeply important to understand what environment you're in. I've made the mistake in my career many times where I look at advice online and try to translate it to my company without understanding if that advice actually translates.
One of the first steps that we looked at a couple of years ago when I joined is what type of terminology can we align on, really simple, really easy to use that can help people speak about experience more often? I'll give you one very simple example of that, is we started to talk about in our executive conversations as well as with the teams, we started talking about paper cuts. Very simple, very easy to catch. We explained what a paper cut is. And if you don't know what a paper cut is, if you're not part of the design community, it's a small piece of the experience that's not working as it should be. You liken it to a paper cut where it's painful. It's not dramatic, it's painful. But just imagine getting 100 paper cuts in the same half an hour. And we chose to go with that terminology because we felt that's an area we want to focus on. We want to focus on raising the bar within the details of every experience so we're able to get end-to-end experiences that work really, really well.
That terminology is now used across the company. It's really simple, but it gives people who are really passionate about raising the bar a common language to talk about with each other across departments. You're now having a common language to talk about a culture of experience first. Obviously it's not the only one, but it's just an example of many. The other piece is we focused a lot on understanding the metrics by which the company measures both experience and business and aligning up a bunch of experience metrics to it. We looked at HEART which is the Google framework around customer experience metrics that focuses on happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success. But we looked at NPS, which I know is a very controversial topic for many people, but we measure NPS as a company anyway so we looked at measuring product NPS as a way of understanding how products measure against each other more than anything else, very lagging metric.
And then we looked at leading metrics and built mechanisms around measuring the experience. That empowered the business to understand how we think about experience, but also researchers and designers and product managers to understand how they speak to the business about it. One of the key mechanisms that we drive this by, we do experience reviews on a weekly basis with the design leadership team and the R&D executive team. These are focused on the key experience of looking end-to-end from customer journey, understanding the research, qualitative, quantitative, and the metrics to understanding what is the experience going to look like and debating some of those details up to the point of, "Okay, what are our next steps and what do we expect that experience to change?"
And we also do a weekly experience review with the executive team, including Aman, our CEO, looking at some of our key experiences. And in that experience review, we're very intentional about discussing the experience ahead of anything else. So we table business discussions on this that are related to what this experience is supposed to drive. These are mechanisms, well-intentioned mechanisms but mechanisms, and they help raise the bar and raise the bar of the conversation itself in ways where one meeting is not going to change the world, but the fact that we do it weekly at multiple different levels actually enforces a culture of experience across the board.
Ash Oliver:
So well articulated. I think the prioritization and the cadence is what sticks out to me around the experience reviews. That's not just a priority and a ritual that's taking place inside the company, but that it's at this frequency. Is there anything else that you would want to share around how this is reinforced from the culture?
Jehad Affoneh:
I'd probably do this mistake once a year at least where I think it's easy to sit down and try to design the whole system, which is really important by the way and not to be taken lightly, versus starting somewhere with building these mechanisms. As an example, we started experience reviews just within the design leadership team and it was our way of ensuring that the design leadership team is well aligned on the experiences we're shipping across the organization. And we spent probably six to eight months where it was just within the design leadership team, meaning designers, researchers, product managers come to the team and present and there is a schedule and so on and so forth. But we spent two hours a week in experience reviews.
That evolved into actually because we're doing that mechanisms, teams felt this is really useful to them to do within their own teams. So there are now experience reviews within the team. Obviously we had design threats and design critiques, but there is a structure to the experience review that we follow that forces us to think end-to-end, starting with the customer journey down to research, qualitative and quantitative, down to the actual experience we're shipping, down to the areas of the experience that we might not think about often, like how's it going to be supported, how does the sales team talk about it and so on. And then when we felt ready, we felt like, "Okay, this is now something we want across the company." And we started thinking about what we call executive experience reviews with the CEO and team. We now have a system end-to-end that goes through the company of experience reviews, but it didn't necessarily start that way. We had the vision that it would end up that way, but it didn't start that way.
I think the best mechanisms are often mechanisms you have control and immediately executing on as long as they fit within a larger system so you're not going all over the place inventing different mechanisms that may be interrupting other operating systems in the company, but you also don't have to go really big to start with. Just like anything else, you can start really small within your team and expand from there.
Ash Oliver:
And it goes back to the mechanisms that would be fit to your maturity within your company and that company's culture and what mechanisms might be best to leverage is going to be very context-dependent. We're getting into how research is being informed and through these experience reviews, it's quite clear that research is part of how it incorporates insights into these collaborative sessions. Can you talk a little bit about what research looks like as a whole at Toast? Maybe starting with the organizational construction of research, does it look like a centralized model, decentralized? Is it embedded? What does research from non-titled researchers look like?
Jehad Affoneh:
So at those, we have a hybrid model that's shifted over time. Currently, researchers are centralized in that they report up into the design team but decentralized in that they report into different design leaders embedded across the different lines of business. And to be clear, design leader here is an umbrella term. It's important to clarify what we mean by design leader here because it's easy to assume, "Hey, design equals product design. So product design leader research is secondary to it." But we think of design leaders as multidisciplinary leaders who are leading product design, user research, in cases where a business needs it, UI design and so on. And researchers can also be a design leader.
So we actually moved from a centralized model where we've had a single research leader in design that everybody reports to into a decentralized model within design. And in that reorg that we did in '22, we actually made two research leaders in the team, design leaders that lead both product design and user research, which it was a tough change for researchers but it also was a signal of the growth path of researchers leading not just only research but actually growing into choosing between leading just research but also into being design leaders that lead the end-to-end experiences of some of our businesses.
It was tough initially for some researchers because some researchers rightfully so have core values around reporting to a researcher. I have a background in engineering, for example, and initially as I went into design thinking about different principles and different disciplines and different... It's not always easy so I get it, but we tried to index on what is the best possible way we can organize in order to deliver the right outcomes. One thing we repeat constantly within the design team at Toast is a principle that we hold near and dear to our hearts, which is the way we operate is customer-business-team-self in that order. So as we rationalize any decision, including organization decision, we look at what are the outcomes we're trying to deliver to customers? What are the outcomes we're trying to deliver to the business? What are the outcomes we're trying to deliver to the team? And what are the outcomes I'd love to see out of this personally for each of us.
And we organize starting with maximizing customer outcomes, business outcomes, and team outcomes. And what we often see is that it's a forcing function to make the right decision, but actually the best outcomes for customer business are also the best outcomes for the team because it's how you can influence better, it's how can you be closer to the work? How can you make impact? But we do have ways in ensuring the research, discipline remains strong at those. One of them is like the research guild, what researchers have time to get together to learn from each other. We have research ops that brings teams together and ensures that we have the same processes and ways of understanding customers. We have training. The way we onboard every single designer, user researcher, UI designer and so on to Toast includes a way of teaching them how Toast does research and how we want them to be part of that process. So even though we're decentralized at reporting, we actually have a lot of intentionality around ensuring that we're still growing in the same direction as a research function.
Ash Oliver:
I love the hierarchy principle of being customer first, business second, team, then self, and how that cascading effect happens. Also, the uniting factors through re-ops and the research guild. I think that's a great segue into how Toast is empowering research to happen. What are some of the tactical processes or systems that are in place in order to power research from within this model?
Jehad Affoneh:
One of the key things we align around is looking at the most important customer problems that require the most research. If you think of a circle of impact and you think about what is the most important defining customer problems we really deeply need to understand or we don't know and we need to dig deeper into? Often the bigger the problem, the more important it is to customers and the business, the more rigor and intentionality we need around it, which often means the researcher, the title of the researcher in that group is likely the person to lead some of that effort to deeply understand that customer problem. And we often have a hypothesis around the customer problem that we either want to validate or better understand, from as simple as, "Hey, I built a UI and I want to see what customers think about it," down to customer sentiment and everything in between.
We strongly encourage everyone across the company to talk to customers consistently, and our job is to empower them and equip them with easy-to-use method that make that conversation more effective. I think a lot of times, I hear from awesome up and coming research leaders the struggle of, "I want to kind of wrap my hand around every conversation that happens around the company." It's really frustrating when someone comes and says, "Oh, you talk to five people? I talk to five people and I actually think the opposite of what you think." And when you dig deeper to it, obviously it's not the same rigor. It's not the same methods. It's not the same conversation. It's not the same questions. It's leading questions versus actually understanding deeply. And sometimes the first instinct is to say, "Well, you don't get to talk to customers because you're not displaying enough rigor in your conversation with customers. So I get to talk to customers and not let you know," and I think that's where some team lose the plot on what needs to happen.
We try to instead equip every single person in the company to talk to customers. We have deep belief that the more customers you talk to, the better informed about the customer problem you are. Even if you're not a perfect researcher, even if you're not doing it exactly the right way, the more customers you talk to, the better. Our job through research and research apps is to help equip you with an easier way to make that conversation more useful for you and for Toast, and by that, more useful for the customer. We do this through lightweight training. We do this by making it really easy to collaborate with the research team and shadow the research studies. We do this by making it really, really easy to look at past research so you're learning from the best before you have your conversation. We make this really easy by ensuring that there is some prep before a conversation that says, "Okay, what is the hypothesis that you're trying to understand? What are the questions you're trying to ask?" and so on.
But we try to make sure that the message is every hour with a customer is a better value for Toast regardless who's having the conversation. And in that, it changes the conversation internally around back to the same lingo and the same conversation. Everybody wants to talk more to customers, which in my mind is a great thing.
Ash Oliver:
It really points out the level of maturity, not just for research, but the level of operation around customer-centricity within Toast that as you described, there are several streams of insights and lots of people are talking to customers and coming to their own points of view and conclusions. When that tension arises between differing points of view, what are some effective ways that you've seen to solve for that or maybe an example story of how that's come to bear?
Jehad Affoneh:
We look at this in a couple of different ways. We try our best within teams, which is a strong collaboration of the product org, to have pretty clear hypotheses and customer problems really open and available to teams as a way of driving their conversation with customers. I think the biggest tension you find is when someone has already redetermined a feature they want to build or an experience they want to build and their conversation with customers is really just confirmation bias. It's basically I go to Ash and say, "Hey, you do podcasts. Wouldn't you love it if we have this feature for you that does this thing?" And obviously in that conversation, Ash might say, "Yeah, that would be cool." And I can come back and say, "Five out of five customers I talked to said they would love to have this feature."
The conversation we're not having is, first of all, that's obviously a pretty leading question, but also we're not having a conversation with the customer about their problem and their need. We're not having a conversation with the customer about the trade-offs adding that feature may result in. We're not having conversation about this versus the 50 other things we're considering and their value relative to each other. We're not having conversation about the complexity this adds to the rest of the product and so on and so on. One of the really helpful ways of managing that conversations that I find is to get things out in the open about what we're trying to do and have an honest conversation with the team and equip in particular the product leaders and design leaders to have that conversation with each other, what questions you asked, how did you think about it, what hypothesis were you trying to validate and so on and so forth. That forced the conversation of, "Well, I'm not really sure that's actually telling us what it's telling us and here's why and here's coaching and how you could have done that in the future."
And these conversations that actually sound simple, but they're pretty tough because sometimes you're going into circles trying to argue that the decision that you're already trying to make, but I think this is where training and help for in particular product leaders in the organization really helps. Because one of the pitfalls of these conversations is sometimes they happen as one function teaching the other function how to do their job, so the conversation in the room is the research team is trying to tell you as a product manager or as a designer how to do your job. And you've done your job wrong by asking these questions. That's a conversation that doesn't go very well.
If the conversation is the other way around where actually we've talked about this in the absence of a specific research study, especially with product leaders, directors and so on, and now there is a product leader in the room who said, "That's not my understanding of how we should be running this." That conversation is much, much more powerful and obviously the research or design leader in the room can offer to empower and equip and help of like, "Oh, I'm happy to jump in and help you. Actually, let's collaborate on this and run it together." That attitude changes the discussion in the room and it's really difficult to do. It sounds really simple, those conversations, especially early on. The more you have them, the better the culture gets.
Ash Oliver:
Prioritizing research insights when customer interactions and insights occur so regularly such as at Toast, I can see how that might be difficult in some areas. And really leaning on collaboration, it sounds like interrogating the rigor, identifying potential bias, supporting the teams through tools and training in order to run research more effectively. These are some really good tactics, and I think that that's really valuable to help teams navigate that, especially in highly customer-centric organizations. What does maturing research look like at Toast? I'm really curious about what's on the horizon because to me, it's very indicative of a mature research and customer-centric organization. What does the future of research look like at Toast? What is the future of customer-centricity? How are the two linked in? And what's next?
Jehad Affoneh:
This is where we go back to customer-business-team-self and what are the outcomes we are going to continue to drive moving forward. And one of the key outcomes we look at today is how do we drive better end-to-end experiences across our customer journey? So we have a pretty mature discipline within each independent vertical. We have a pretty mature discipline across some of our product experiences, but we actually want to do a much better job at understanding end-to-end experiences that span multiple different parts of the customer journey. Just as an example, if you think of onboarding as a very simple experience, there is part of that that's a product experience. Once a customer looks at a screen and starts onboarding, there's part of that that's in the store or in the restaurant that's installation or how do I set up the hardware? There's part of that that's the hardware experience. How does the hardware show up? We have really awesome industrial design team that thinks about all the details of that and software team alongside them that thinks about installation and so on.
We have sales processes and sales teams and the operations in the background. We have marketing and what are the customer's expectations? We have care. And you can tell how one onboarding experience that the customer may think of actually spans multiple different teams, multiple different departments, multiple different timeline, multiple different customer segments and so on. And part of the maturity we're going through is to figure out how do we marry some of the deep research work we do with service design work that we've been doing over the last year or so that's been really instrumental in shaping some of our experiences.
So if you think about these problems, really complex, cross-functional, impactful problems, there's a ton of work in understanding where the fragmentation in the journey is in order to look at that journey and defragment it. And understanding the fragmentation of the journey requires really mature research work, but also really mature representation of that work, really mature ways to operationalize the results of that work while research remains involved in the details. There's research in every part of that journey. Then as we make changes to that journey, there's continued research into how these changes are affecting the end-to-end journey. That requires a level of maturity where research is deeply ingrained in the whole end-to-end process and most importantly, not just on the product side, outside of R&D side, outside of the product side. It requires new muscles that we don't always train as user research teams within product that I'm really excited about.
Ash Oliver:
That's really cool to think about how research is embedded throughout the entire process and zoomed out from just the product experience. When you're thinking about becoming a true customer-centric business, I think what this interview has encapsulated is it really requires you to go beyond the surface level efforts and embrace customer-centricity as a core business tenet. And there's a commitment I think to that but in which guiding principles sometimes might run contrary to short-term tactics. And knowing that you've led so many design and research teams at notable companies like VMware and Splunk before Toast, what have you observed as the most important principles to get right in building customer-centric companies, especially in enterprise?
Jehad Affoneh:
I think the customer-business-team-self resonates really well even with companies that may not be customer-centric but aspire to be customer-centric because it gives them a lingo to start orienting around. And the more you use it in mechanisms in the room of saying, "Well, this would be great business impact, but I'm not really sure I understand what the customer outcome would be." And if we're truly going to say customer-business-team-self, then we should have a conversation around what is the customer outcome? You're starting to have a conversation that forces thinking around the customer outcome, again, depending on the maturity of the company you're in.
I think the toughest part of enterprise is that you're multiple steps away from the customer. In enterprise design teams, you always talk about the idea that the buyer isn't the user, which creates a big challenge of if you're competing on feature lists with procurement teams, it's a very different conversation than if you're competing on user value. That said, I think that's actually really shifting, especially in enterprise with users driving how to pick software, with how easy it's becoming to switch software. In certain cases, new companies in enterprise are raising the bar for experience in ways that's showing the 10X better. Think about your expensing experience five years ago versus now regardless of the company you're using.
So these things are moving in the right direction, but I would say there is a fundamental way in showing, not telling that's really critical, especially in enterprise companies that design teams have control over. Experience reviews is a good example of that. You can set up experience reviews with design leaders and slowly expand it to invite product managers and engineers. This is a very simple tactic, not to say it's the solution, but what may help you do is to start to recognize who in product engineering teams are customer champions that can help you cross the chasm elsewhere. Then you can start picking these areas and actually showing what a customer-centric way of doing things results in.
I think the pitfall of many teams, and I've done this mistake in my career more times than I can count, is to skip the step of showing and move immediately into the step of teaching people what they need to do, which often backfires very quickly. A lot of teams go in and say, "That's not how you should be customer-centric. Here's what customer-centricity means and here's what you need to learn to become a customer-centric person, team, or company." The problem with that is, one, it's very theoretical. So sure, I agree, I'm going to go back to doing my thing. Or two, it puts you in a position where you're being taught how to do your job, which is not very fruitful versus a collaborative way of showing you what this method could lead you to do. It's a much longer path to be clear, but it's a much more impactful path.
The second piece I would say is focusing on short-term outcomes is not a bad thing. It gives you an opportunity to actually iterate very quickly on this cycle. If you're in a company where you just care about the quarter, for example, I'm just taking an extreme example, quarter business results, and they really care about speeding up the process to get to some number, ARR or business metric within a quarter, it's actually a pretty good opportunity to show what design can do and what an experience-led process can do within a very short amount of time within a quarter. And then expand that to say, "Look what we can do if we had two quarters to do this or if we planned this at the beginning of the year." I would take short term as an opportunity to bring in a continuous improvement and iteration process versus as a pure challenge of how to push against those short-term results. As long as you have a long view in mind, there's a lot you can do in the short term.
Ash Oliver:
What great advice, to not overlook the opportunity in the short term as well and then reinforce the groundswell of customer-centricity through gaining these allies. When you opened the episode, you talked about going to a lot of restaurants that are especially Toast customers, and I'm curious. Have there ever been any surprising observations? Do you do any fly on the wall, in context observation just silently that has been surprising to you at any of the restaurants you've attended?
Jehad Affoneh:
Every time I'm out at a restaurant, I always ask the server how do they enjoy the experience of especially the Toast Go, which is the handheld experience, and I do my best to hold back and I often fail from asking them to go into the kitchen and see what their process looks like and talk to the manager or owner, which my family deeply enjoys of course.
I'm always inspired but also reminded of how complex running a restaurant is, and that probably translates to anybody who's listening and their customer base. Doing the job is almost always more complex than our understanding of it. We have deep research into how restaurants run. We're a vertical SaaS company, which means restaurants is what we wake up every morning to worry about and think about. But I'm always discovering a youth name in the complexity of how a specific kitchen run, a challenge that a restaurant had to solve because of their area or community. That actually really changes how we think about things.
I'll just give you an example. When egg prices were going up in California, I met with a restaurant that serves drinks that have egg whites in them, and they were talking to me about how they're managing their pricing and their menu based on offering a version of the drink that doesn't have egg whites because of the price of eggs, and they were thinking about ways of making that easily customizable in particular for drinks in a certain way as prices fluctuate for certain items. We obviously have menu flexibility and all these other features, but such an interesting use case that's so specific to the drink menu in a way we didn't think about it before that actually impacts their livelihood. It impacts their bottom line and their margin.
I'm always reminded of how complex the details are and how much more there is to the journey than the way you draw it on a screen, which is why I love these conversations. I love chatting with restaurants. Restaurants are awesome. Whether you work in the restaurant industry or not, it's so awesome to listen to their feedback. It's so inspiring to see the work they do, and it's so inspiring to see the passion by which they care about hospitality and food. I will never see restaurants the same way I did in again a good way.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, I think restaurants are such a core component of the fabric locally and takes such a tremendous amount of effort to be able to run a restaurant, so this is a real testament to what it looks like to be customer-centric, truly and deeply customer-centric. And restaurants seem like they're all the better by having such a customer-centric company like Toast in support. So transitioning into the last part of the episode, this is where we ask a series of questions just to get to know you personally as a guest a little bit better. So my first question for you is what's one thing you've done in your career that's helped you succeed that you think few other people do?
Jehad Affoneh:
I like writing a lot. I really, really wanted to be a journalist. That was my first career choice. I approached things from that perspective. It's probably not something that few people do, but I do it probably more often in a more structured way than a lot of people. But I also do my best to rationalize my thinking with writing, and one of the ways that helps me a lot is to rationalize other people's thinking would write it. So when I'm having a discussion with someone and I don't feel like we're getting through to each other, one of the ways I try to rationalize that is by taking a minute, writing a one pager that says, "Here's my position, here's their position." And if I'm unable to write their position in a way that sounds logical and reasonable, it's probably a sign that I don't understand them.
Because I could write it in a logical way and disagree with it so I could see how they can take it that way but I disagree, versus actually this makes no sense to me. I'm writing it down and it's nonsensical. Doesn't make sense to me. That more likely speaks to my understanding than their position. It's been a really good way for me to rationalize where are we talking past each other or are we disagreeing with each other or are we actually not operating from the same principle? That's been a really useful way for me to do my best to try and empathize with other positions that I may not agree with.
Ash Oliver:
Wow. I love the way that you've brought this into your personal interactions with work. My next question for you is what is the industry-related book that you've given or recommended the most and why?
Jehad Affoneh:
Yeah. I'm a huge fan of Ray Dalio, the book Principles. I don't like every piece of it. I don't like everything in it. But the reason I like it is when I initially read it, it changed my thinking around some of the ways of how you operate by starting with principles and how that changes a ton of the conversation that follows. We often operate for very long without understanding that we're operating off of a different playbook, which translates into unnecessary tension, translates into area where we disagree and debate and continue to debate but we can't get to a conclusion because we actually don't have principles to go back to. So it really changed my thinking around defining key clear principles and what a principle is. So for example, we talked about customer-centricity, and sometimes a principle in a design exercise or a product exercise is like principle number one, deliver a great experience.
Well, my first question to any principle that we put on paper is, "As opposed to what?" If you're going to write a principle down, you have to be able to answer the question, "As opposed to what?" Deliver a great experience to customers as opposed to what? Versus saying principle here is this experience should not impact the bottom line in any way. Okay, now, you and I may disagree on that principle and we should debate it and we should close on it, but it's actually a hard edge principle because even though the experience is 10 times better, if it impacts our bottom line, we're not going to ship it. Again, you and I may have really strong disagreements about this, but at least when we come back to it, there's a hard edge principle to drive that discussion. And the idea is that we would have the principle's discussion in advance of doing the work, so we come up with it as we have to have the debate.
The other book I like is not new but Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. It's a pretty good culture read on how to drive cultural change in company.
Ash Oliver:
Love that. Great recommendations. My last question for you is what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Jehad Affoneh:
That's a good question. I don't know if it's absurd, but with friend circles and sometimes work circles, I love asking provocative, deep questions and go back and forth on them. It really helps me understand a person. One question I'll leave people on the podcast, if you get paid two-week luxury vacation anywhere in the world that you want fully paid for but you get to never visit that country again in your life, which country would you choose?
Ash Oliver:
Oh, that's a big one. I'll let it linger for the listeners. This has been so great, very inspiring to speak with you on what this looks like inside of Toast and who you are personally as a leader. So thank you so much for being here.
Jehad Affoneh:
No, thank you so much for your time. This was a lot of fun. You do an awesome job moderating it, so I really, really appreciate it.
Ash Oliver:
Thanks for listening to The Optimal Path, brought to you by Maze, the user research platform that makes insights available at the speed of product development. We'll be taking a short summer publishing break before returning this fall with brand new episodes. If you'd like to know when the next season of episodes air, you can subscribe to the podcast newsletter by visiting maze.co/podcast. Have any thoughts on this season or requests for new guests? Send us a note with any thoughts or feedback to podcast@mazedesign, and until next time.