Ava R.

Adam D. does it all! At Toast, Adam leads a team of engineers dedicated to maintaining and improving the industry-leading Toast Kitchen Display Screen (KDS). However, his expertise does not stop at the screen. Not only is Adam a Toast Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead, but he brings his technical lens to the charm of his Woburn, MA-based eatery, The Fox Den, a restaurant he opened in 2022. Adam offers a unique perspective on career growth and entrepreneurship. Follow along as we dive into Adam’s entrepreneurship journey, his tips for starting a career in tech, and how to embrace every path to success. 

What initially drew you to Toast, and how has the company supported your transition into a Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead role? 

There were two primary things that drove me to Toast back in 2017: 

First, working on an innovative, Android-driven Point of Sale was big for me as a long-time Android fan. The restaurant industry was waiting for innovation, and I was excited to be able to join that mission.  

Second, my family grew up in and around the food service industry, and my brother had been cheffing for a while. I was interested in helping to foster his knowledge and getting deep into restaurant technology to help him take the leap towards his own restaurant.

With the unique perspective of being both a Toaster and a Toast customer, how does using the product in your own restaurant influence the way you lead your engineering team and approach innovation at Toast?

My five-year sabbatical actually almost aligned with The Fox Den opening, so I spent a good chunk of that time in the restaurant: working on the menu, cooking, serving, running, and expediting food. At this point, most of my involvement in the restaurant is through Toast, working with cash flow, sales summaries, product reports, and payroll. This has given me a broader view than when I was just on the kitchen team.

Actually utilizing our product  helped me understand where the KDS fits within the greater Toast ecosystem, see how data is used between all the various product areas, and provide some of that context and customer empathy with my team.

Personally, I find that the closer I am to the user of the software, the more I understand what is important. Owning a restaurant certainly helps to shed light on how our software is used and what's really important to our users.

I'm also excited to be a part of our "Owners Table" Employee Resource Group community here at Toast, which is a group of Toasters who are also business owners. The existence of this group highlights the importance of having subject matter experts at all levels across the company. By being both a restaurant owner and a Toast employee, it has given me an intuition for what feels like the right solution, both as owner as well as employee. 

Can you share more about how the Toast Kitchen Display System helps restaurants thrive. 

A kitchen specifically can be a very chaotic environment. On our KDS, we have a feature called Item Fire By Prep Time. On paper, you know the burger takes 6 minutes to cook, the salad takes 2 minutes to prepare, and the fries take 4 minutes.

Item Fire By Prep Time controls when those items show on each KDS device so that each item should finish at the same time. In reality, if the item that takes the longest isn't started immediately, then all the other items will be put up to the expediter before the longest prep time item is completed. Knowing when items are started becomes crucial to ensuring that the system adapts to changes in the "on paper" calculations, and ensures that the kitchen staff don't need to work harder because of a feature that was meant to make their lives easier.

I'm a big proponent using the products you make. This can be tough when you're making products for businesses and not people, but this experience gives me a direct line of feedback from the restaurant staff, guests, and other owners as we continue to build out great features here at Toast. 

Looking ahead, what opportunities do you see for Toast to continue empowering customers? 

Honestly, there's so much! But what I worked on last year was bringing kitchen fulfillment data to our owners and operators via Toast IQ, and I think that getting kitchen efficiency data in a more accessible manner is going to be a huge win for restaurants. From a customer perspective, Toast IQ being able to tie data from all of our data sources together is going to really provide insights that used to take me hours and many excel macros to piece together. 

What would you tell a prospective Toaster about the growth potential here? Why is now an exciting time to be part of the Toast journey?

The growth I‘ve seen on the Android App team since joining Toast has been incredible. Teams that were once solely focused on mobile now have growth opportunities in web services, AI tools, and web front end. My general guidance for more junior engineers is to try everything, find out what you like, and dive deep into it. I think with the general opportunity at Toast now, that's not only reserved for junior engineers. As Toast branches off to Retail and beyond, the scope of interesting problems to innovate on only increases.