Customer Obsessed Design
How 7shifts uses design to make restaurants over the moon about team management.
Creating a culture that obsesses over customer satisfaction is easier said than done. It means everyone has to be invested in the mission we are pursuing which is fundamentally rooted in making restaurant teams more successful. This requires a customer-centered approach to every part of the business, which is exactly how we do it at 7shifts.
I remember first hearing about 7shifts from a colleague when he decided to join a little startup of ~10 people. I started following them on social and eventually started meeting with the CEO, Jordan Boesch, over several coffees and lunches. I was captivated by his passion for simplifying restaurant management and his drive to build a successful tech company right here in the Canadian prairies. Not long after that, I signed up!
One thing that stood out in the early days was the explosive customer obsession and the drive to make every experience an 11. For product development, this meant that we were talking to customers on a daily basis, involving them in conversations about the product early and often. Was this a dream? Nope. Just a company that truly values our customer’s perspectives to ensure we build high quality experiences and make their lives easier.
Our commitment to quality is reflected in our core values and embraced by every member of the company on a daily basis. Customers are included in problem discovery and throughout the product development process. The entire ecosystem of 7shifts revolves around restaurateurs and industry workers to ensure we build what they need to be successful.
But, what does this have to do with design?
I’m on the side of the argument that believes design is about understanding the problem before implementing pixel perfect UI. If we don’t spend time with our customers, hearing their perspective, and understanding their behaviours and motivations, we will not create experiences that elegantly solve the root problem. I always like to say 70% of design is understanding the problem and 30% is executing on the solution (give or take).
Design at 7shifts started before there was ever a person with “Designer” in their title. It started with a belief that we could solve problems better by understanding our customers. It started with the founders, not the UI. It started with the conviction that firing 2/3 of our customers would be better for restaurants in the long run.
I’m extremely grateful for the early adoption of design and how it continues to be a foundational element of our product ideology. Not all startups recognize the value of UX, but lucky for us our founding team — especially Jordan — have always been huge advocates for great design from the beginning.
“I was never satisfied knowing that our customers weren’t over the moon about what we were doing.”
— Jordan Boesch, BetaKit
Fast forward to today and we are still acting on this fundamental belief that designing a great experience starts with the people that use it. This seems pretty simple, and it is — if you have the culture that supports it.
I’m happy to say that our culture at 7shifts supports this 11/10 times. To this day, every team is still driven by customer obsession. We regularly share stories in our #customer-love Slack channel where anyone can post screenshots of a recent email, app reviews, or conversation with a customer or prospect that is beaming about what we are doing.
That being said—we aren’t perfect, and we embrace new challenges with the same customer obsession in our feedback loops and iteration cycles. We closely monitor negative reviews, NPS ratings, and support tickets that didn’t leave our customers feeling ecstatic.
This is good design in action. A constant, non-linear, back and forth of feedback and iterations. Learning, testing, building, learning, testing, building, over and over to deliver something that customers are obsessed with.
How do we pull this off?
In order to properly understand how 7shifts laid the foundation of good design, we need to go back to the very beginning. So, I thought I’d go to the source to discover how it started.
I sent Jordan a handful of questions to better understand his approach to design in the early days, and how it’s evolved as the company has grown over the years. I hope you get some insights into how we continue to push for customer obsessed design at 7shifts.
Let’s start at the beginning — building the first version (2005)
Dan: Tell me about the problem you discovered and how you started building what is now known as 7shifts.
Jordan: I originally discovered the problem of scheduling and managing staff while working for my dad at the multiple Quiznos locations he owned. I would watch him painfully try and manage everyone’s constantly-changing availability, then finally input it into a schedule, only to have it change minutes after he published it.
I spoke to my Dad about this. I brought the idea to his attention after watching him painfully manage scheduling. He seemed onboard and could take all the help he could get!
It was [a problem] worth solving because I knew how much time it could save him if I could shave minutes or even hours off of his busy day. Restaurant operators are crazy busy and it was no different for my dad. Every second counted.
Dan: How did you arrive at the first solution? How did you validate and work through different concepts?
Jordan: I taught myself how to write code to build him something small to help solve this pain point around scheduling. The solution was a website where he could upload an Excel spreadsheet and staff could all login to download it. It was a fun side project for me because I just enjoyed learning how to build things that people found valuable.
I didn’t really work through multiple concepts, just the one. It was just a simple solution, which is how I believe most problems should be initially tackled.
I basically just asked “does this help you, Dad?” and his response was a resounding “Yes!”. He was my only user, so as long as he was happy, I was happy with the result. However, it didn’t stop me from improving it over the years.
“It was a fun side project for me because I just enjoyed learning how to build things that people found valuable.”
Fast forward a few years to when 7shifts became a business with you, the co-founders, and a few staff (2010–2017)
Dan: What did your process look like to discover and validate concepts at this point?
Jordan: My process was operating more-so in a subconscious way, but at the end of the day, it really just involved listening to the customer, which in this case, the customer was my dad — I knew he had this pain point. His process would be that he would collect all the sticky notes of staff availability on his desk, go into Excel, open last week’s schedule, clear it for the next week, and start inputting shifts for the following week. After that, he’d print the schedule.
I asked him to do an additional step, which would be to post the schedule online, which he did effortlessly. Embracing this additional step meant that it saved him dozens of phone calls of staff phoning-in asking when they’re supposed to work. It was validated by his quick adoption of this new process.
I had never done anything like this before, so essentially, I was learning on the fly on how to build a website just as much as my dad was learning how to use it!
“Outside of the co-founding team, our fifth hire was a designer. Looking back, that would be way too late by today’s standards.”
Dan: What was your ideology about building the product?
Jordan: It needed to be simple and customers needed to be “over the moon” about it. If you take all the readings about startups, they all talk about iterating and building something small to validate your idea. Building the ability to upload an Excel spreadsheet that evolved into a scheduling platform is a prime example of that. The initial iteration of an uploaded spreadsheet added enough incremental value, was quick to deploy, and other feature requests followed thereafter, meaning there was an appetite to take it further.
Dan: What made you prioritize ease of use? How did you inspire your team around that ideal in the early days, when this can typically be seen as an after-thought or nice-to-have?
Jordan: I’ve always been a big believer in building a product that sells itself. Back when we started, there wasn’t a term for this type of thinking, but now the industry refers to this as PLG (product-led growth).
I believe too many software companies were running without a strong design backbone, they just treated design as an afterthought. I was a programmer with design-sense and I always loved using products that were elegantly designed and had a great user experience, so when we started growing, it was an important hire for us to make.
Outside of the co-founding team, our fifth hire was a designer. Looking back, that would be way too late by today’s standards. I was very critical of our design, even in the early days. I didn’t care about what was trendy, all I cared about was consistency in both the UI/UX and that we were delivering a great modern app experience.
If I felt something didn’t meet the standard of a great UX, we would openly discuss it. I’m sure our early designers will tell you that I was always being a bit “nit-picky!” My passion came from a place of deep care for the customer to have the best possible product in the market.
Dan: Why was it important to you to make something that our customers were “over the moon” about?
Jordan: Founders and startups work so hard around the clock, but if you’re doing that and all you’re hearing back is “yeah, it’s pretty good”, then it’s not worth it to me. Why spend all that energy for basically a 3-star rating? The only feeling that is worth pursuing is when your users are ecstatic about the product and want to tell all their friends about it. We still push for this to this day.
Dan: How did you determine the kind of roles that were necessary to drive this result?
Jordan: I honestly had no idea. All I knew was that there were some designers in our local community that were doing great work and that I wanted to work with them!
Now, several more years into the business, just reaching the 200+ employee milestone (2021)
Dan: How does the process compare to those early days?
Jordan: We are much bigger since we started and have recently crossed the 200-employee threshold, so design meant something different at our 10-person startup than it does now. We have an entire design team devoted to carrying out our vision around simplicity and usability on the design side. The team has their own philosophies and values that they uphold within their department. We have incredibly smart people creating these processes now and the stakes are much higher given how much we’ve grown, so more rigor is put into action to test and iterate on designs before rolling out changes.
“While we may never be perfect, chasing it means we’re constantly challenging ourselves to be better.”
Dan: How does the company discover new problems to solve now?
Jordan: The company hasn’t drastically changed when it comes to solving new problems. Our product and design teams keep a close pulse on our restaurant customers to ensure we’re understanding their needs, whether it be running customers through Figma mockups, listening to Gong calls, or sitting on calls with existing customers.
We have a vision of building into the employee lifecycle pillars, which we define as: hiring, training, scheduling, paying, and retaining. We often hear problems that cut across at least one of these pillars, so in many ways, it’s not “if” we’re going to build into it, it’s “when”.
Dan: Has your ideology changed about building a great product?
Jordan: If anything, I’ve become more picky about it — ha! As we grow and become known for building a great product, it’s important that we don’t become complacent and think we can ride that out. It’s important that we have the mindset of constantly improving and feeling like we’re not perfect yet.
While we may never be perfect, chasing it means we’re constantly challenging ourselves to be better. People often say “it’s not the best product that wins”, but I think a more modern way of looking at this in a product-led company is that executing a successful go-to-market strategy will not be possible without having a great product.
Dan Stumph is the Director of Design at 7shifts, a team management platform built to improve performance for restaurants. He enjoys meeting new people, dreaming up big ideas, and eating a lot of food.
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