Creating Tomorrow: My First Year at Chick-fil-A
by Gabe Hoffman
This is part 1 of a series on my experiences in my first year as a software engineering lead at Chick-fil-A, focusing on modernizing our critical Point-of-Sale infrastructure.
My Story
I enjoy doing hard things. Ever since I started programming when I was ten, I’ve relished the complexity of software development. Growing up through the personal computing revolution, then the internet revolution, and now firmly on the other side of the mobile revolution, I’ve learned that building products that delight people takes a whole team or even a whole team of teams to be working together to achieve that purpose. Doing hard things with great teams is why I love being in software development and love my role as a Senior Engineering Lead at Chick-fil-A. Yet doing things at a large scale with large teams can be even harder than untangling concurrency issues in your code.
Chick-fil-A had been on my radar for several years, but I wasn’t sure what sort of priority they put on Engineering. The success of the Chick-fil-A One App, the ways they use technology to enable the Drive Thru, and the stories of what it was like to work there made me want to take a closer look. After digging in, asking many people there, and a lengthy interview process, I made the leap. I’ve enjoyed every step of my journey and I’d love to share a first-hand account of what my first year in Chick-fil-A Engineering (we call it DTT, Digital Transformation & Technology) was like was like and maybe it’ll help you decide if it’s a fit for you, too.
The digital footprint of quick service restaurants (QSRs) is rapidly changing, so it makes sense that DTT is growing rapidly as well. Chick-fil-A knows that this is an important strategic bet and has been heavily investing in its digital footprint for several years now. Even before the pandemic — and now especially after — we all see the role technology plays in a flexible digitally empowered enterprise. You hear companies like Domino’s refer to themselves as a technology company more than a pizza company. If you want to be near the front lines of tech, being at a tech company makes a lot of sense. But being at just a tech company can be a roller coaster. With all the growth and investments being made, it seemed to me like Chick-fil-A was maybe on a similar journey toward becoming a tech-based company.
As a mobile developer, I’ve consulted at startups in the heart of San Francisco and worked on apps inside the major players in Silicon Valley and Cupertino. Tech companies are what I’m used to. So, when I was getting to know one of the leaders of DTT and he said Chick-fil-A isn’t ever going to be a “tech company,” and that it is not even a chicken company, I was curious to find out what kind of company he thought it was. It turns out, if you ask anyone at CFA what kind of company we are, they’ll tell you we’re a people company. Chick-fil-A aspires to be the world’s most caring company. How does a people company do technology? What’s that like in practice? Let me tell you my story about how I have been genuinely surprised to learn that being a people company first was the key to unlock being able to do hard things with great teams.
When I look back on the success and failure of the apps I’ve worked on, I’ve begun to understand that almost none of the major challenges we faced were particularly technical in nature. After you get to a certain level of competency in your programming skills, the biggest challenges you will face will begin to be the human ones. The culture you create seems to determine more than the code you write. The first half of your career is about getting the skills needed to play at the level you want to play. As they say at Apple, excellence is the price of admission. The second half of your career is about how good you make the people around you. It switches from just tech skills to include people skills.
Learning from NEXT
Every year Chick-fil-A takes the corporate Staff and all the restaurant Operators to a fun location for an event called NEXT. You get to hear from the upper levels of leadership as well as some well-known speakers. I couldn’t help but wonder if the talks were going to be more aspirational than rooted in reality. I wondered how much of the “corporate messaging” made its way to the actual front lines of writing software. It’s fine to call people up to lofty ideals, but can the culture in the office really embody those in practice?
Here’s a really quick summary of my biggest take-aways.
- Go pioneer the future.
- Because pioneering isn’t easy, there will be some off days, we’ll need to get good at being kind while we are doing the hard stuff.
- Pioneering is stewarding the fire of the process of innovating, growing, and serving.
- To pioneer the frontier we’d need to cultivate our people skills. Chick-fil-A celebrates caring for people… and what you celebrate, you cultivate.
These messages were not what they were hoping to achieve in the future; they were more of reminders of how we got to where we are. They were statements meant to give permission to go forward… guardrails to work inside of… and shared language to use to nudge each other in the right direction. In my mind, they were tools to help us do the hard people things while we wrangle our code to ultimately delight our guests.
As I reflect on my first year, I am surprised to find how well the takeaways from NEXT tell the story of my first year experience.
Create Tomorrow Together
Chick-fil-A has been using the same Point-of-Sale system, called “ServicePoint” (we think about point-of-service, not point-of-sale), for the last 15+ years. That means the tech stack is aging. Nevertheless, it has enabled our restaurant team members to serve millions of guests while ringing in billions of dollars in sales. The platform has been solid and reliable. Using it, we achieve the highest drive-thru throughput numbers in the world.
But we want to do more. We want the system be capable of facilitating the radically convenient and remarkably human experiences that our restaurant Operators and Team Members provide to guests that keep them coming back for more.
We needed to innovate at a greater rate. Do we dare replace such a foundational system? How could we even begin that process? Isn’t some executive going to label that as too risky?
Maybe at some other companies, but not at Chick-fil-A. In our culture, we have the permission to pioneer. We have the charge to go and create tomorrow. We might have the best drive-thru experience in the country, but we want to make it even better.
We are aiming to make a generational shift in our ability to innovate on the Point of Sale (how we ring orders) and the Kitchen Production Systems (how we know what to prepare and bag for guests). We believe that if we can give a great experience to our Team Members, they can create those caring experiences for our guests. We believe that giving our Operators the best tools in the industry means that they can innovate in the field. We believe that using modern technologies and best practice methodologies will allow us to unravel a mountain of dependencies and will let our software engineers do their best work.
As we set out to innovate in this space, we asked what should we keep? What should we replace? What should we transform? How can we find out? Who should we ask? As we asked the people that use and support the current POS system, patterns began to emerge.
Survivorship Bias
To illustrate what we found, imagine a bullet hole ridden plan in the height of WWII, as this story explains. When planes came back from battle, the wings often had the most bullet holes. The default assumption was that it would be best to focus on patching up the areas with the most holes and leave the others alone. However, engineers eventually learned that what they really needed to do was protect the engine and fuel systems. Wings could take hits and the plane could fly, but the planes that had engine and fuel system hits never returned.
This counterintuitive logic is called survivorship bias. It is when you forget to add in the evidence of all the things you don’t see (in this case the planes that never returned were not fairly considered).
What our findings suggested was that our innovation needed to not focus only on the obvious (cosmetic fixes to the aging UI, etc), but perhaps to the overall user experience that nobody was even complaining about… those parts of the ecosystem that were either so bulletproof that they could take quite a few hits, or that maybe when they did get hit, had such quick responses due to their impact that they were almost unseen.
We wanted those areas to continue to be strong and reinforced so that we maintain a healthy, “battle ready” system. This meant that we had to build both the obvious things that everyone was asking for, and to double down on those areas that had contributed to the longevity of the systems we were aiming to replace. We had to ask some hard questions and make some big architecture decisions.
Making Radical Innovation Real
As we made these assessments, some radically new ideas emerged; ideas that were potentially very disruptive to the POS (now called CommercePoint) Modernization program’s initial plans. If we were to adopt these ideas, a few of the teams in the program would have their whole plans for the year get erased and a few teams might not even be needed anymore. But it also might speed up our delivery timelines by a few years.
How do you propose such a big, disruptive, crazy idea? I went to my boss (who has been with the Chick-fil-A for 25 years) and asked him where to start. He told me that these decisions are best made by the people closest to whom they impact. While the folks in the seats at the top have a lot of authority, they also know that we are the ones that know our areas of work the best. That’s why they put us there. They trust us. They engineered the people systems so that we can engineer our software systems. He suggested I get the leads of all the teams together and make my case. I’ve only been at Chick-fil-A for a few months at this point, so this was more than a little daunting. The idea could have died here, but it didn’t. From what I could gather about our culture, the worst that could have happened is that it was not a good fit, but that my efforts to innovate were appreciated. In our culture it’s better to error on the side of trying rather than on the side inaction. So, I gave it shot. For three days we sat together as product owners and lead engineers and challenged ourselves with hard things and made difficult decisions together. We weighed our current roadmap against a potential new road and reflected on the lessons learned from our previous generation system.
Chicken Forever
As a group we chose this crazy idea. We wanted to pursue “Chicken Forever,” our code name for the project. That meant that several teams had to rework their charters or rethink their whole reason for existing. Here, people have the confidence to know that if a product gets re-imagined, we will find you new work. We want this to be your last interview and last stop in your career. That trust we build means we can consider doing things that might become territorial wars in other organizations. At Chick-fil-A we know that we are here to serve. We are all moving towards the same goals.
I am happy to report that we are in the midst of this giant “Chicken Forever” change right now. Our leadership really does embody the phrase from Team of Teams, “Eyes on, and hands off.” Our team of teams did this innovation.
One last thing that is my favorite part is that, even though I brought the idea to our team of teams, the team owns the idea. When we made the call to pursue this big idea, everyone committed and started executing. The team made the choice, and the team has continued to commit to the choice. Our leadership has championed the idea across the organization and helped it succeed. This kind of team of teams and these kinds of leaders are rare.
If you want innovation to happen, it either happens right in the middle or it dies. If an idea starts too high up and is too prescriptive it can’t find its way to good soil. If it starts at the bottom and can’t get enough light from the top, it won’t have the energy to find life. Breakthrough innovation has to come from a place that it can find roots and find light. Our teams started this radical innovation from the middle and it found both light and roots, and now Chicken Forever is flourishing.
I’d love to go into all the details of innovations we are making and all the cool things that we are cooking up in our engineering kitchens, but it is still early. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to share more about Chicken Forever in the future when it is live and in the wild.
In my next few posts I want to continue the story and tell you how we are “doing hard things with kindness,” how we are “stewarding our story,” and finally, how we work toward getting “better at together.”
