ChowNow Innovation & Technology Culture

Describe a project you’re especially eager to tackle in the new year.

In the first half of 2024, ChowNow purchased Cuboh Software. Over the last year and a half, we’ve worked with our colleagues in Cuboh to harmonize our infrastructure. With that effort behind us, we want to build on that work to provide even more value to our restaurants. While we’ve tightly integrated Cuboh’s engineering systems with our ChowNow systems, we want to continue building on that integration to take full advantage of it. 

My teammates and I are looking forward to working with our product and domain experts to improve the user experience and simplify the process for all involved. We will collaborate with our colleagues across the company to revitalize our onboarding and billing systems to make it easier for our restaurant partners to access the complementary features and functionality found across our product offerings. Not only will we look to our internal resources, but this is our opportunity to leverage our third-party software providers. I’m looking forward to the challenge of meeting the business requirements for billing and payments while simplifying the path a restaurant takes from initial inquiry to its first online orders.

What technologies and/or practices is your team leveraging to tackle this project?

We’ve recently reorganized the engineering organization into specific domains. The aim of this reorganization is to equip our individual development teams with the resources necessary to see a large-scale project from progress conception to completion. Each domain is a micro-company within ChowNow. Working with the product organization, we will have input into how we tackle requirements and be able to take ownership of meeting the company goals.

As an engineering organization, we’ve invested heavily in AWS and so will be taking advantage of what it has to offer. Onboarding and billing have an influence over every aspect of a client’s experience with the data from both making its way through multiple different services and software platforms. To keep these systems independent of, albeit communicating with, each other, we plan to take advantage of the event-based solutions AWS provides. 

Additionally, AI is opening up new avenues for us to automate and simplify onboarding new restaurants. Taking advantage of ML to process restaurant data will reduce the time restaurant owners will have to spend getting online with ChowNow.

How does this project tie into larger company goals?

Helping independent restaurants thrive is ChowNow’s long-held North Star. The restaurant industry is very competitive, and the less time restaurant owners have to spend away from the business of satisfying customers, the better. Simplifying our onboarding and billing process will allow restaurants to get online faster and start taking orders sooner. We love to hear from our restaurant partners, but the less time a restaurant owner has to spend working with us, the more time they have to focus on delivering great food to eager customers. 

Not only does this project align with our North Star, but it also aligns with our other goals for 2026. This includes increasing the number of restaurant partners on our platform. Simplifying and accelerating the onboarding process will reduce the amount of restaurants that don’t complete the onboarding steps and directly lead to increasing our partner count. To achieve that simplification, we plan on leveraging more automation and AI. This is another one of our 2026 goals: identifying where automation and AI can be applied thoughtfully and effectively.