A restaurant needs an essential collaboration between front–of-house staff and back-of-house staff. And it's a great metaphor for a technology team.

In the back of the house, numerous talented people, from chefs to line cooks to kitchen staff, all have to play their roles expertly to produce that excellent, differentiated meal countless times a day. The potential complications are numerous, so everything must be top notch in terms of both invention and execution.

But if you want to be a great restaurant, your front-of-house operation also has to be equally masterful in terms of interaction, delivery, coordination, and the overall customer experience. Without this front-of-house mastery, the brilliance of the meal would go under-appreciated at best. 

And if either side of this front-of-house/back-of-house collaboration falters, your restaurant is in trouble.

When it comes to building a technology team, everyone always thinks about the back-of-house first; your technical chefs and cooks, the behind-the-scenes platform wizards, the technology maestros. You need those people, and they need to be great.

However just as important – although much less commonly resourced – are the essential front-of-house technology skillsets that have very little to do with the gears and levers under the hood.

These are the skills needed to meet people where they are. To offer support and training, to understand where things are working and where they could be improved. This front-of-house, human-to-human side of technology takes its own brand of rare brilliance to execute well, and it’s every bit as essential as having brilliant cooks in the kitchen.

Your back-of-house maestros are working their brilliance to keep the system evolving, focusing on the next fix, the next improvement, the next addition. That's critical.

But who is making sure that people actually know how to use the system as it exists today? Typically the answer is, pretty much, no one.

If your staff are lucky they may have received an initial training at some point. But chances are they only caught some of it. Their jobs may have changed since. The system has changed since. And people just don’t realistically learn by getting one training and then somehow retaining everything from there forward. 

Instead, they’re probably out there stumbling, guessing, screwing up, feeling unsupported, messing up the data, wasting time on inefficient systems and workarounds, and feeling extremely frustrated. It’s incredibly common. It’s the rule rather than the exception.

So if your team only has back-of-house maestros focused on adding new fixes and functionality to your system, you're leaving a huge piece of value on the table.

What your frustrated staff really need are some talented front-of-housers who love getting out there, wandering amongst them, asking questions, understanding needs, and helping out.

It’s as simple as that, and it’s incredibly transformative. 

Imagine what it would be like to have front-of-house staff who understand the tools and who possess that certain brilliant human-to-human instinct for empowering others. Who thrive on offering support and training and up-skilling people. Who enjoy just getting out there, being proactive, and finding ways to offer help before it’s even requested.

Not only does it result in staff everywhere feeling more confident and empowered on your systems – which is important in itself – but there are other significant benefits too.

Usage of the system increases as people feel more confident in how to use it, rather than bailing out for workaround shadow systems and disconnected spreadsheets.

Your data and content quality also starts improving, because people are no longer improvising their own unique, often mistaken ways to use your systems. Suddenly the things you worked so hard to architect and build are getting used correctly.

And perhaps most transformative is that your entire technology platforms team – both your front and back of house experts – start to have a much better finger on the pulse. Because the front-of-housers are out there “on the ground” closing the feedback loop on what’s working, what’s not working, and how the system could be improved; on how they can constantly save people time and knock hurdles out of the way. It’s an amazing way to ensure the essential stream of intake for improvements and ideas never dries up, or disconnects from the reality on the ground.

The best front-of-house technology people just have that something special about them. So you can tell them: get out there into the bloodstream of the organization and make it your mission to help and empower people. Go make this a truly great restaurant.