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Toast Engineering

To build innovative technology solutions that empower restaurants to delight guests, thrive in business, and focus on what they love.

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To build innovative technology solutions that empower restaurants to delight guests, thrive in business, and focus on what they love.

Strengths

  • ECOSYSTEM: Comprehensive end-to-end restaurant tech platform
  • EXPERIENCE: Deep restaurant industry expertise in engineering team
  • SCALE: Supporting 85,000+ restaurant locations with reliable tech
  • INTEGRATION: Open API architecture enabling partner ecosystem
  • ADAPTABILITY: Cloud-native infrastructure enabling rapid iteration

Weaknesses

  • FRAGMENTATION: Multiple codebases across acquired technologies
  • LEGACY: Technical debt from rapid growth and acquisitions
  • RELIABILITY: System stability challenges during peak service hours
  • TALENT: Engineering hiring challenges in competitive tech market
  • COMPLEXITY: Product complexity creating steep learning curves

Opportunities

  • ANALYTICS: Advanced data analytics for restaurant performance
  • AUTOMATION: Kitchen automation & robotic integration capabilities
  • EXPERIENCE: Personalized guest experience technologies
  • EXPANSION: International market technical adaptations
  • PAYMENTS: Enhanced payment processing innovation

Threats

  • COMPETITION: Increasing competition from tech giants entering space
  • REGULATION: Evolving data privacy regulations across jurisdictions
  • CONSOLIDATION: Industry consolidation creating larger competitors
  • CYBERSECURITY: Growing sophistication of security threats
  • RECESSION: Economic downturn affecting restaurant technology spend

Key Priorities

  • PLATFORM: Unify fragmented technology into cohesive platform
  • RELIABILITY: Improve system reliability during peak periods
  • ANALYTICS: Develop advanced restaurant performance analytics
  • SECURITY: Strengthen cybersecurity capabilities and infrastructure

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To build innovative technology solutions that empower restaurants to delight guests, thrive in business, and focus on what they love.

UNIFIED PLATFORM

Create a seamless, integrated restaurant technology suite

  • ARCHITECTURE: Define and document unified platform architecture with 90% engineering alignment by quarter end
  • MODERNIZATION: Migrate 40% of legacy codebases to new microservices architecture with 99.9% reliability
  • INTEGRATION: Reduce API fragmentation by 50% through standardized gateway implementation across all services
  • EXPERIENCE: Achieve 95% feature parity while reducing UX friction points by 30% in unified admin dashboard
ROCK SOLID

Ensure unshakable system reliability during peak times

  • RESILIENCE: Implement chaos engineering in 100% of critical services with documented recovery procedures
  • PERFORMANCE: Reduce p95 latency by 35% during peak restaurant hours across all core transaction flows
  • OBSERVABILITY: Deploy enhanced monitoring covering 95% of customer-impacting services with automated alerts
  • AVAILABILITY: Achieve 99.99% uptime during peak restaurant hours, including planned maintenance windows
DATA POWERHOUSE

Transform restaurant data into actionable intelligence

  • INFRASTRUCTURE: Build centralized data lake ingesting 100% of product data with standardized schema
  • INSIGHTS: Launch 5 new AI-powered analytics features with >25% customer adoption in first 60 days
  • FORECASTING: Deploy demand prediction models achieving 85% accuracy for inventory and staffing needs
  • PERSONALIZATION: Implement guest personalization engine with 40% higher engagement rates for customers
FORTRESS

Build impenetrable security across our technology stack

  • COMPLIANCE: Achieve 100% compliance with SOC2, PCI-DSS, and GDPR across all services and products
  • DETECTION: Implement real-time threat detection reducing average breach identification time to <15 minutes
  • ENCRYPTION: Deploy end-to-end encryption for 100% of customer data at rest and in transit with zero exceptions
  • TRAINING: Ensure 95% of engineering team completes advanced security training with certification
METRICS
  • Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): $1.2B
  • System Reliability: 99.99% uptime during peak restaurant hours
  • Engineering Velocity: 25% increase in feature delivery with maintained quality
VALUES
  • Customer obsession
  • Technical excellence
  • Collaboration
  • Innovation
  • Diversity & inclusion
  • Data-driven decision making

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Align the learnings

Toast Engineering Retrospective

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To build innovative technology solutions that empower restaurants to delight guests, thrive in business, and focus on what they love.

What Went Well

  • GROWTH: ARR grew 32% YoY exceeding analyst expectations by 5 points
  • ADOPTION: New product adoption rate increased 28% across customer base
  • RETENTION: Engineering team retention improved 15% through investments
  • INNOVATION: Launched 12 major platform enhancements ahead of schedule
  • EFFICIENCY: Cloud infrastructure costs reduced 18% through optimization

Not So Well

  • RELIABILITY: Four significant service disruptions affecting peak hours
  • INTEGRATION: Delayed integration timelines for recent acquisitions
  • TECHNICAL: Technical debt accumulation outpacing remediation efforts
  • VELOCITY: Feature delivery velocity decreased 12% in core product areas
  • SECURITY: Two minor security incidents requiring engineering resources

Learnings

  • ARCHITECTURE: Microservices architecture transition requires rethinking
  • PROCESS: DevOps improvements dramatically impact customer experience
  • PRIORITIZATION: Better alignment between eng and product crucial to ROI
  • METRICS: Engineering metrics need better linkage to business outcomes
  • SCALING: Current architecture has scaling limitations at growth targets

Action Items

  • RESILIENCE: Implement comprehensive resilience program by end of Q3
  • PLATFORM: Create unified platform strategy to address fragmentation
  • DEBT: Allocate 20% of engineering resources to technical debt reduction
  • ANALYTICS: Develop centralized data lake with standardized APIs for all
  • AUTOMATION: Increase test automation coverage to 85% across all systems

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To build innovative technology solutions that empower restaurants to delight guests, thrive in business, and focus on what they love.

Strengths

  • DATA: Massive restaurant operations dataset for AI training
  • ADOPTION: Early AI implementation in forecasting features
  • EXPERTISE: Growing AI engineering talent within the organization
  • INTEGRATION: AI-ready cloud infrastructure already in place
  • ACCESS: Direct restaurant relationships for feedback loops

Weaknesses

  • SILOS: Data fragmentation across product lines limiting AI impact
  • SKILLS: Gaps in specialized AI talent across engineering teams
  • GOVERNANCE: Immature AI governance and quality control systems
  • PRIORITIZATION: Unclear AI investment prioritization framework
  • AWARENESS: Limited engineering-wide AI capabilities awareness

Opportunities

  • FORECASTING: AI-powered demand forecasting and inventory management
  • PERSONALIZATION: Hyper-personalized guest experience capabilities
  • AUTOMATION: AI kitchen operations and labor optimization tools
  • INSIGHTS: Competitive intelligence through aggregated data analysis
  • VOICE: Voice-enabled ordering and kitchen management systems

Threats

  • COMPETITION: Well-funded competitors with advanced AI capabilities
  • REGULATION: Emerging AI governance regulations and compliance
  • EXPECTATIONS: Rapidly evolving customer AI expectations
  • ETHICS: Potential bias in AI-driven recommendations and decisions
  • TALENT: Fierce competition for specialized AI engineering talent

Key Priorities

  • DATA: Unify fragmented data for comprehensive AI capabilities
  • FORECASTING: Develop AI-powered forecasting for operations
  • TALENT: Acquire and develop specialized AI engineering talent
  • GOVERNANCE: Implement robust AI ethics and governance framework

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AI Disclosure

This report was created using the Alignment Method—our proprietary process for guiding AI to reveal how it interprets your business and industry. These insights are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, legal, tax, or investment advice.

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