TBM 394: Imagine If a Restaurant Behaved Like Your Average Product Team (Extended Edition)

Sometimes the stars align, and a LinkedIn post attracts all sorts of amazing comments. That happened recently with one of my posts on LinkedIn. Below I have the original post, and then a summary of the 100+ comments. Drop into the thread and comment if you can bear the current state of LinkedIn.

Original Post

Imagine if a restaurant behaved like your average product team.

The kitchen is packed. Everyone is moving. Every station is busy. Prep lists are long. Meetings are constant.

There is always something to do.

Chopping, rearranging, documenting, planning, replating.

But plates rarely reach customers.

When they do, they’re late. Or wrong. Or cold. Or oddly disconnected from what the diners said they wanted. Yet the kitchen isn’t “failing,” exactly. It never looks like a crisis. No one storms out. No one flips a table. Diners don’t riot. They just lower their expectations and stop coming back.

Inside the kitchen, though, the staff feels productive. Everyone is exhausted. Everyone is “at capacity.” Everyone can point to a dozen tasks they completed. They can even argue those tasks were important. And in isolation, many of them were.

But restaurants are not judged by how busy the kitchen is. They are judged by how consistently they deliver great food, on time, to the people who ordered it.

Product development is strange because this feedback loop is muted.

There is no instant revolt.

A team can be unbelievably heroically busy without producing much that actually moves the needle.

That’s the trap: in software, effort is easy to generate, activity is easy to justify, and impact is surprisingly easy to avoid.

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Customer Feedback Loops and Frontline Awareness

Many commenters emphasized that one key strength of actual restaurants is the visibility and immediacy of customer feedback—a dynamic that’s often missing or ignored in product teams. The restaurant staff—especially waiters—can sense dissatisfaction and course-correct in real time. P

roduct organizations, by contrast, often treat Sales, Customer Success, and UX Research as peripheral or “downstream” functions, blunting the feedback loop.

• Shannon Gray: “If the kitchen makes a misstep, the servers let them know before customers even start to notice. The servers are the ones whose financial incentive is most impacted by poor service...”

• Akshay Singhal: “As someone who’s operated a restaurant and led product management—I can 100% confirm there is no hiding from customer feedback in a restaurant.”

• Michael F.: “The kitchen should be clamouring for feedback, and the PM should be pushing for it.”

• Hugh Greene: “I’ve worked where Sales and Customer Success were described as ‘downstream,’ and... there was little attention... to their feedback.”

• Andrew Sims: “Working as a waiter… you build a sense of their different flavours… And you get to see how they react, you build a sense of what they need.”

• Skipper Chong Warson: “If only someone would come out of the kitchen and talk to one of the customers to find out about the misses and problems and dissatisfaction with the orders!”

• Brian Graham: “The issue is really around feedback culture and fear of healthy conflict that could lead to collaboration and better service.”

• Vitaly Friedman: “One little thing I always try to put in spotlight… bottlenecks… that result in negative outcomes… and when people start multi-tasking at stand-ups, that’s a bad sign, too.”

Leadership Dysfunction and Misaligned Incentives

Commenters surfaced a recurring theme: leadership often causes or enables dysfunction by optimizing for optics, volume, or growth-at-all-costs, while ignoring practical constraints or staff wellbeing. Whether it’s misaligned incentives, legacy decisions, or performative activity, the damage often flows top-down.

• Ha Phan: “If Product were a restaurant, every exec would walk into the kitchen suggesting a new dish. None would ask if the stove had room.”

• Jess Kadar: “They would lay off half the kitchen staff and hire more non-cooks to go around and show people how to season their food.”

• David Russell: “The maître d’ doesn’t care that plates aren’t leaving the kitchen... because his incentives are tied to how many diners he can convince to sign up and pay before the truth leaks out.”

• Robin Wallmeroth: “The menu is written and changed mid-meal by a manager who doesn’t speak to the kitchen or waiting staff... Gordon has visited and shared feedback multiple times, but the entire staff know better.”

• Jason James: “Exec: ‘We don’t grill burgers here, we bake them... This is a franchise—none of our locations use grills.’”

• Hang Xu: “Imagine if a restaurant behaved like Workday… ‘This is the only restaurant we’re allowed to eat at?!’”

• Cameo Doran: “It’s so painfully accurate, and it doesn’t have to be that way. No wonder executives want to replace their product teams with AI.”

• Holly Vezina: “The analytics I was always obsessed with was… actual people, actually using my products.”

• Sander Buitelaar: “Reminds me of what Stewart Butterfield calls ‘hyper-realistic work-like activities.’”

Motion vs. Impact (Busy ≠ Effective)

Many resonated with the observation that teams can appear productive while delivering very little of value. People can be “at capacity,” rushing from meeting to meeting, documenting and prepping—but nothing actually ships. In contrast to restaurants where food either hits the table or doesn’t, software teams can hide behind motion.

• Suleman Siddiqui: “Smart people, solid intentions, but workflows held together with duct tape. So the kitchen stays busy, but the plates never leave the pass.”

• Phyllis Njoroge: “You can be less busy in the kitchen than other restaurants and have happier customers, but many assume busyness is the proxy or prereq.”

• Pooja Vithlani: “Busy kitchens aren’t a sign of low performance, they’re a sign of missing constraints... teams drift into performative productivity.”

• Peter Orlovacz: “I call them stationary bike companies. Everyone gets tired by the end of the day, but we ain’t getting anywhere.”

• Nikolaus Rademacher: “Now imagine the cook pulling the roast out of the oven every five minutes… for a ‘quick user test’... It’s raw. It’s not seasoned.”

• Simon McCade: “This is why I’m a fan of shipping little and often… so you know if the dish is cold before you’ve made 50 of them.”

• Fabrice Talbot: “You can judge your non-productivity by the % of time spent in meetings.”

• Kenan Wang: “It becomes easier to get absorbed in internal concerns, and easier to forget about the outside.”

Lack of Strategy and Menu Creep

Without strong strategic boundaries, teams chase customer whims, exec directives, or competitive mimicry—leading to bloated backlogs and fragile operations. This theme explores how absence of product clarity breeds complexity and chaos, not flexibility.

• Mitchell Clements: “Now imagine the restaurant has no menu... There’s no vision or strategy. It’s just, ‘we make whatever the highest paying customer says they want.’”

• Neil Smith: “A restaurant starts simple... but then the menu expands to chase every edge case. Coordination cost goes up and quality starts to drop.”

• Mary Beth Snodgrass: “Experimentation should be more strategically designed... Strategic, holistic, systems-thinking is typically undervalued.”

• Ha Phan: “Every time someone suggested removing a stale dish, someone else would say, ‘But what if one customer loves it?’”

• Ha Phan: “Half the menu would just be the top sellers, spotlit, upsold, and impossible to ignore.”

• Lee Jones: “If Product were a restaurant, they’d react to the surgence of veganism as a H2 next FY OKR.”

• Dorothy Ryan: “We might serve a rare steak to an anemic looking guest who asked for salad — because we made them what they actually need, not what they ‘think’ they need.”

• Dave Martin: “The chef must revise menu items if they are not selling… must make sure the rest of the business is ready and aware of the menu.”

Unpredictable Customer Behavior and Shifting Requirements

Unlike diners with well-defined expectations, software customers often change their minds, need discovery support, or misunderstand their own needs. Product teams can’t simply fulfill orders—they have to anticipate, adapt, and often reframe the ask entirely.

• John Ogden: “In restaurants, when someone says ‘I want a medium rare steak,’ they know what that is... Very few of these statements are true for software.”

• Nathier Abrahams: “Customers don’t outright say what they want to order... Kitchen staff have to ‘discover’ what they want.”

• Will Brown: “Customers would walk in… talk to you for 30 minutes, then leave, never to be seen or heard from again.”

• Kevin Borders: “It would be more like a restaurant if the restaurant created a new dish for every customer.”

• Casimir Artmann: “Worst pizzeria ever near Legoland… They had to look up the recipe for pizza — just like a normal software team.”

You Forgot the Rest of the House (Beyond the Kitchen)

Several commenters pointed out that restaurants succeed as a team: the kitchen is just one part of a larger ecosystem. Ignoring the role of hosts, servers, and bussers skews the metaphor. Likewise, in tech, impact depends on coordination across Sales, CS, UX, and Ops—not just Product or Engineering.

• Shannon Gray: “Where are the servers?!... Feedback is loud, aggressive and heard from teams across the house.”

• Maya Ninova, PhD: “Product doesn’t exist in isolation... Restaurants function because it is very clear who is doing what and everyone is responsible... Quality is currently not even a topic in many product teams.”

• Markus Andrezak: “There is the service design metaphor of the waiter and the kitchen and who may even enter the kitchen.”

• Andrew Sims: “Always ask your server to pass your regards on to the kitchen. Those chefs need feedback. They work their asses off.”

It’s Not Just Software That Struggles

The metaphor applies far beyond software. From deep-tech to fine dining, many industries experience the same systemic traps: overwork, blurred ownership, inertia, and fading quality. Complexity and entropy are universal challenges.

• Matt Turner: “At the top you say product team and at the bottom you say software... I work with lots of product (and service) teams... everything you said applies.”

• Richard Gratton: “All industries are equal-opportunity when it comes to making a mess of things.”

• Jolyon Tidmarsh: “This all applies to hardware or ‘deep tech’ product development too.”

• Lukasz Boruszko: “Having worked in both – busy kitchens and busy dev teams – I can only concur.”

Discovery and Strategy Happen Before the Kitchen

A few pushed back on the analogy’s timeline: the kitchen is not where everything begins. In high-functioning orgs, the real work starts upstream—with experimentation, vision, and menu planning. The breakdown often begins when teams skip discovery and rush straight into execution.

• Partho Ghosh: “At Michelin-starred restaurants... a Chef de Cuisine experiments on multiple dishes endlessly before anything hits the kitchen.”

• Vitaly Friedman: “Are we treating symptoms or solving core issues?... Is it many small changes or a large-scale initiative from the top?”

• Mary Beth Snodgrass: “Strategic, holistic, systems-thinking is typically undervalued.”

• Nils Davis: “The kitchen wasn’t actually capable… due to resources and skills… And when they did send a dish out, it wasn’t palatable.”

Alternative (or Expanded) Metaphors

Some commenters offered metaphors that they felt better captured the absurdities of modern product orgs. Airlines ignoring customer pain, burger chains with no grills, and software teams shipping raw ideas—each added texture to the original analogy, illustrating just how widespread and surreal the dysfunction can become.

• Arpy Dragffy-Guerrero: “A better analogy might be an airline where core problems go unfixed while flashy new features are demo’d... Seems too real.”

• Jason James: “Exec: ‘We don’t grill burgers here, we bake them... This is a franchise—none of our locations use grills.’”

• Laura Baker: “You’d have plates going out with only a fraction of the dish on because they are just trying to get the minimum out (with the rest to come later that never does).”

• Justin Dickow: “Kitchens are just more immediately accountable, the feedback loop is much faster... Software product teams are in the middle.”

• Darrell Ross: “Love the subtle jab at the quest for local optima (everyone is busy at their stations) vs. seeking macro optima (delivering great food to the tables). Very Goldratt-ish.”