Finding a restaurant that makes the whole group happy is impossible! Decide what to order and the menu doesn’t help! Where is the waiter? Custumers wants to order more They want to pay fast!
The Need
Dining out is meant to be an enjoyable experience, yet it is often marked by friction at every step of the journey. Customers struggle to decide what to eat, face limited menu personalization, experience slow or inconsistent service, and frequently encounter delays when it comes time to pay. For restaurants, these pain points translate into inefficiencies, operational bottlenecks, and lost opportunities to deliver differentiated service.
At the time, the food service industry was largely underserved by digital innovation. Unlike other sectors, there were few reference solutions or mature technologies addressing the end-to-end restaurant experience. This lack of benchmarks made traditional market research insufficient, requiring a deeper, exploratory approach grounded in real-world observation and direct engagement with restaurant owners, waiters, kitchen staff, and operational teams.
The core challenge was not simply digitizing menus or payments, but reimagining the restaurant experience as a connected ecosystem. Waiters needed real-time access to customer preferences, dietary restrictions, and allergies to provide personalized and attentive service. Kitchens required better order orchestration to improve speed, accuracy, and quality under pressure. Customers, in turn, expected a seamless experience from menu discovery to payment, without unnecessary interruptions or delays.
There was a clear need for an integrated, cost-efficient platform capable of connecting customers, waiters, and kitchens through intuitive digital experiences. The solution had to reduce operational complexity, adapt to different restaurant realities, and deliver personalization at scale—treating each customer as a VIP while increasing service efficiency.
Ultimately, the need was to transform dining into a frictionless, personalized, and efficient journey, where technology works invisibly in the background to enhance service quality, empower restaurant staff, and allow customers to enjoy their meal from the moment they sit down to the moment they simply stand up and leave.
My Role and Key Results
My responsibilities:
• Co-founded the startup, defining the vision, value proposition, and end-to-end strategy for a connected restaurant ecosystem.
• Built and led distributed development teams across multiple countries, managing engineers, designers, and product contributors in a global setup.
• Led deep discovery and market validation with restaurant owners, waiters, kitchen teams, and customers to uncover real operational and experience pain points.
• Defined and designed end-to-end customer, waiter, and kitchen journeys, translating insights into scalable UX, UI, and interaction models.
• Drove product strategy and execution from concept to launch, aligning people, technology, workflows, and delivery through full lifecycle ownership.
Results Achieved:
• Validated an end-to-end connected restaurant ecosystem linking customers, waiters, and kitchens through a unified digital experience.
• Enabled real-time personalization at the table by surfacing customer preferences, dietary restrictions, and allergies to wait staff.
• Increased service speed and order accuracy through streamlined kitchen orchestration and task prioritization.
• Reduced operational friction by eliminating traditional checkout and payment delays, enabling a seamless “stand up and leave” experience.
• Delivered a scalable, cost-efficient platform adaptable to different restaurant formats, improving overall service efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Technology and Skills
Customer Experience, Product Strategy, Software Development Management, User Experience, Art Direction
Results
+
0
40
% Efficiency Orders Collection
Problem 1 (user)
Problem 2 (waiter)
They have 9 systems from 7 vendors… it’s too expensive, hard to learn and time consuming They don’t know the profile of my customers and can’t afford market research They need more customers.
Problem 3 (waiter)
Customers keep asking me questions and I don’t know the answers If they knew customers better, they could offer them personalized service.
Executive Summary
No other industry spends so much money to touch its customers so many times, and yet knows so little about them. Meanwhile, every aspect of the dining experience, other than the food itself, is broken. Finding the right restaurant, making a reservation, deciding what to order, interacting with the waitstaff, paying the check… all of these processes are handled in a very primitive and manual way. Rockspoon is reimagining the dining experience from the ground up, solving the customer’s problems while improving restaurant operations in the dining room, kitchen, and back office, and—for the first time —giving the restaurant a direct and persistent relationship with the customer through customer app and mobile CRM. We provided mobile & fixed POS, payment processing, reservations, delivery (no logistics), takeout, CRM, HR, analytics, and inventory management. We offer customers an app that enables a personalized and fantastic dining experience.
I started from the branding
The idea was to bring the concept of spiking the spoon into a rock, or even every time you remember about food the brand comes into your memory. It’s a cool name and strong at the same time. Like a Rock! I developed all the concept and colors. Using the psychology of colors I decided to use red. Red leaves you hungry!
The research. Palo Alto CA
During the discovery we had a help of teachers from Stanford University only in the process of interviews with people. It was where we got in the 3 problems involving restaurant customers, restaurant owners and waiters. After made the process of interviews we got the help of restaurant owners and waiters from the Palo Alto region who were interested in the project. They were our steakholders! Working together with professionals in the area we have obtained effective and effective results, discovering technological problems and among others such as: Wifi in the kitchen does not work with 100% efficiency due to physical problems such as too much metal or water nearby can hinder communication with the routers. The coolest thing of having area professionals working together was being able to test multiple versions of software until you came up with a functional concept.
Customer Mobile APP
Imagine a solution able to really recommend restaurant suggestions and dishes according to your food preferences even discovering if you have any food restriction and allergies. Customized menus, being totally personalized and treating the users as unique individuals also bringing personalized recommendations in micro moments. Also being able to make reservation of tables or organize a group of guests already with the correct recommendation that please the taste of each person of the group. Time to pay? Just leave the restaurant and pay in the UBER style or split the account the way you want or even transfer the account to another table.
During the discovery we had a help of teachers from Stanford University only in the process of interviews with people. It was where we got in the 3 problems involving restaurant customers, restaurant owners and waiters. After made the process of interviews we got the help of restaurant owners and waiters from the Palo Alto region who were interested in the project. They were our steakholders! Working together with professionals in the area we have obtained effective and effective results, discovering technological problems and among others such as: Wifi in the kitchen does not work with 100% efficiency due to physical problems such as too much metal or water nearby can hinder communication with the routers. The coolest thing of having area professionals working together was being able to test multiple versions of software until you came up with a functional concept.
Creating workflows for the customer app and also coordinating and approving the flow with developers
I have created the workflows and navigation logos and at the same time coordinating all this with development teams around the world and many different fusarios. Teams spread across Brazil, Lebanon, Germany and Belarus. Times scattered due to reducing costs and at the same time working with the best developers in the world without having the cost of relocations.
Creating the logic and functionalities for smartprinter
We create our own printer with the help of software engineers and product designers having the first model made by a 3D printer. I created functionalities and the logic for this smartprinter. Workflow including any functional interaction of a printer model that works connected to an android smartphone. The printer design was aborted due to the high cost to the restaurant owners. The solution was to create an android app that works on any model of android smartphone getting the owner the restaurant the option and decision in choosing the ideal device for the waiters.
Kitchen tablet for cooks and food preparation stations
I created the solution for the whole kitchen. An android app running on large touchscreen screens streamlining the receipt of requests and keeping the entire kitchen under full control and also being able to be used to control shifts/ clock in and clock out.
Reservations
A working tool to make life easier for waitress. Receiving bookings via customer app and also in person or via phone. The solution is able to offer a complete experience to assemble the restaurant floorplan making the experience and processes much more fluid.
Fixed POS/ Delivery and Takeout
A complete solution for receiving and creating new orders.
Payment tablet for non users
Paying has never been easier. Multiple payment possibilities in a single solution that was also targeted in the business. Financial companies such as Elavon and Morgan Chase were impressed by the solution.
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