Kevin Tomasso

The backstory

If you've ever worked in a restaurant, you know that it runs on "organized" chaos.

Typically, "organized" means...

A number of tasks and processes need to happen every day.
The manager is responsible for making sure these processes happen.
Fighting with these processes at every turn is "the chaos."

Servers need items comped, things break, ingredients run out, toilets overflow, bartenders go home sick, steak is overcooked. Chaos has no chill. It will strike at the most inappropriate time to the most underprepared manager.

As part of the new Clarifi suite, our goal was to create a new task-management product that improved upon the functionality of two existing features in our legacy suite to guide managers throughout their day.

We designed Intelligent Workflow to ease the chaos by providing a prescribed and dynamic list of responsibilities for each manager to follow daily. Administrators could configure assignments specifically for managers and hold them accountable for their completion. Managers within the store would have a real-time schedule to refer to keep them on track. The result was a programmatic way to make good managers great and improve the operations of any restaurant.

Personas Involved

Operations Manager

Responsible for authoring company processes and improving operational efficiency. Key goals are consistency between stores and reducing the ambiguity of responsibilities. Frustrations are duplication of efforts and complex workflows.

Store General Manager

Responsible for enforcing operational processes and keeping all parts of the restaurant adequately staffed and stocked. Frustrations are mistake-prone managers and overly rigid or unrealistic corporate guidelines.

Store Manager

Carries out or delegates all tasks necessary to run a successful shift. Their key goals are to get through a day without the sky falling. Key frustrations are that they are responsible for fixing everything that goes wrong within a shift.

Defining the taxonomy

The first challenge we had when conceiving Intelligent Workflow was to break down and define the taxonomy of "entities" we would need to create. We needed a method by which the administrators could create reusable sets of tasks and assign them to different stores to carry out at different times. After consideration and discussion with the Product team, we landed on the following hierarchy:

Workflow: The chronological list of actions to complete at a store each day
Workflow Item: An item within a store's Workflow containing the task's timing and completion status. This could be a Task List or a link to an external site that the manager needs to visit to carry out (e.g., linking to ADP to perform payroll)
Task: A single action that needs to be taken (e.g., "Empty trash")
Task Group: A group of steps or tasks that need to be completed together (e.g., "Cut lemons" + Record number of lemons cut")
Task Section: A logical separation of tasks within a task list (e.g., "Main Bar" and "Patio Bar")
Task List: A collection of related tasks that an employee (or several employees) need to carry out at a restaurant (e.g., "Bar setup checklist")

To illustrate these concepts for Product Managers, Engineers, and Designers to fully grasp these concepts, I created the following graphic. This allowed all stakeholders to "speak the same language" and seriously unblocked the team from churning in conversation.

Task Lists

Every restaurant operation is unique. To enable any organization to set standardized processes at each location, we created Task Lists. These are precisely what they sound like — lists of chores that need to be carried out on a regular cadence by restaurant employees.

Within the Task List product, our three primary personas had different motivations.

Operators needed a way to create open-ended tasks and view reports on their completion.
Managers needed clear directions on how to accomplish these tasks and record progress.
Admins needed to look at reports to understand trends, problem areas, and coachable opportunities.

Creating a Task List

When it came to the creation of Task Lists, we wanted a powerful but familiar way to construct these entities. We designed our UI with the following principles.

Tasks list creation would work as an open-ended form builder
We borrowed patterns from Google Forms, Surveymonkey, and other established products
Tasks could contain rudimentary logic

Publishing and Managing Task Lists

Even at the most standardized restaurant chains, there can be many subtle and not-so-subtle differences between locations. Store size, profit centers (e.g., drive-through, takeout, bar, etc.), operating hours, time zones, local laws, and many other factors can differ between stores.

When publishing (or "assigning") Task Lists to specific locations, we wanted to be able to account for these differences but avoid needing to create multiple iterations of a similar task list to handle the few differences between stores. In addition, we wanted admins to be able to make changes to already-assigned Task Lists.

We employed the following logic to Task List Configuration to accomplish these goals.

Tasks lists were agnostic of location or timeframe
Could exist in a draft or published state
Allowed admins to create a repository of tasks lists needed for all stores

Interacting with a Task List

Given the hectic nature of a manager's job, we needed to pay careful attention to their experience using this feature. To provide a valuable and intuitive experience for in-store use, we used the the following tenants as our guide:

Data entry needed to be simple and portable for store managers on the go.
Follow-ups needed to uphold accountability without blocking progress.
Managers could delegate individual tasks to employees.

Reporting

Task list detail reports allowed managers and admins to review task list progress and coach-up problem areas

Building a Workflow

Task Lists captured a list of granular to-do items relating to a common area of concentration. "Bar Opening Checklist" might contain tasks for filling ice wells, cutting fruit, preparing juices, etc.

But opening the bar is only one of many larger tasks during the day. The Workflow was the collection of all the major steps that needed to happen for a successful day.

A single store's Workflow contained a collection of Workflow Items (see taxonomy figure for a reminder). Workflow items could be Tasks Lists, 3rd party applications (go to ADP for payroll, check the weather, etc.), or tasks within other Clarifi modules (count inventory, order produce, schedule labor, etc). Configuring Workflows for all organizational locations was the corporate persona's highest priority.

Workflow Timing

As I mentioned earlier, different locations could have many variables regarding time. While a Task List may have the same steps for 30 stores, you may want the completion timeframes to vary among those 30 locations. We created the time settings on Workflow Items to account for this needed flexibility with the following options.

Completion timeframes could be set to Day, Week, Month, or As-Needed.
Within the day, due times could be set to fixed hours or relative to the store's open hours (e.g., 1 hour after opening).
Date ranges and recurrence schedules were also flexible.

Workflow Item Assignment

Once an admin had chosen the Workflow Item to be assigned and its completion timing for a like group of stores, it was time to assign it to the appropriate locations — thereby adding that item to a store's Workflow.

After speaking to implementation experts and customers within restaurant operations, it was clear that there were two main ways of approaching this — assigning one item to stores or assigning one store to a set of items.

With that in mind, we designed the store assignment UI with the following guiding principles:

A Workflow Item could be assigned to many stores.
A Store would likely contain multiple Workflow Items.
It was important to allow admins to configure from either entry point.

Results

Clarifi, as a concept, took the industry by storm. We sold nearly a dozen "Lighthouse" customers on the strength of the design, prototypes, and "demoable" features. Intelligent Workflow garnered some of the most excitement in the market.

Once implemented, Intelligent Workflow was slow to gain traction due to the operational change management needed at the corporate level to implement it.

Clarifi was sadly sunset in 2018 after a significant investment in rearchitecting was needed for it to scale properly, and a merger with Fourth provided much of the same capability.

Things I learned

The design of a product can be its number 1 selling point, but if the infrastructure it's built upon is faulty or fragile, the product can be unusable. User Experience encompasses more than visuals and flows — as a designer, you must advocate for a high bar of engineering implementation.
In B2B products, the user you are designing for may differ from the customer who pays you. You must balance what excites an executive that signs the checks with the needs of the majority.
Your work on a project that gets canceled is not done in vain. Much of the research, insights, patterns, and decisions that went into the product will serve you moving forward. Try to use the lessons you learned to improve your next initiative.

Intelligent Workflow