How to build product strategy for modern hospitality tech

It’s the bottom of the 9th. The home team is winning. The fans are on their feet. And the suite admin is trying to get four beers and two pizzas to the guests before the inning ends. She’s toggling between a kitchen display and a paper printout, while the kitchen runs out of jalapeños again.

This is the part of hospitality tech we don’t talk about enough: the people behind the scenes who make it all work. The fan is not the only user. And product teams who forget this leave revenue and trust on the table.

In stadiums, large event venues, and hospitality environments, a product manager’s job is not just to facilitate guest orders. It's to understand the broader ecosystem and ask a fundamental question: who actually uses our product every day? 

The surprising answer: it’s not the guest.

In this post, I’ll walk through common product blind spots in hospitality tech, how GenAI is changing what’s possible, and why building for operational users might be your biggest unlock. 

Recognise who actually uses your product eight hours a day

When building a Point of Sale (POS), loyalty, and ordering tools for stadiums and restaurants, it’s tempting to assume the end guest is the primary user. After all, they’re the ones placing orders and paying.

But talk to any suite admin, bartender, or kitchen lead and you’ll see a different reality. These are the people who touch the system constantly, manage exceptions, and get blamed when something breaks. They’re the ones who:

● Track down missing orders when guests switch seats

● Rewrite receipts to help finance close the books

● Watch printer errors turn into service delays

● Reconcile reports across vendors

● Print workarounds for preorder checklists

● Copy inventory notes from a kitchen manager’s email

If your product doesn’t solve their workflow problems, they’ll find hacks or workarounds, or worse, abandon the feature entirely.

Your biggest revenue unlock is in the back-of-house

This skewed focus creates a revenue blind spot. Most B2B2C POS systems only monetize through transaction-based fees or commissions on guest orders. But relying solely on per-order commissions limits both revenue potential and the perceived value of the platform.

The truth is: your operational users are the ones who would actually pay for speed, automation, clarity, and reduced headcount. If you build features that save them time, reduce errors, and let them scale operations with fewer resources, you unlock a more sustainable business model.

Here’s what this looks like in the real world:

● A food runner who finds the right tray faster

● A barback who can close out tabs without friction

● A suite manager who doesn’t have to spend Sunday night making reorder sheets

● A finance lead who doesn’t need to email support for custom reports Let’s talk numbers:

• A typical stadium KDS handles 1,200 orders in 3 hours. A 5% delay means 60 unhappy customers. 
• Suite managers spend 4–6 hours per week preparing manual preorder sheets. Automation can reduce this by 80%, saving up to 200+ hours per season. 
• Finance teams may spend 1–2 hours per location reconciling reports weekly. For a stadium with 25 vendors, that’s 25–50 hours. GenAI reporting tools could cut this by half or more. 

When these flows break, revenue leaks. And trust erodes. But when they work? You’re not just a POS, you’re a productivity engine.

Why ignoring operational users costs you revenue

Every venue or restaurant has operational power users who never appear in your NPS scores. But they’re the ones who hold your product together, or quietly work around it when it fails:

• The finance team at month-end 
• The kitchen staff during a rush 
• The ops lead onboarding new hires 

They depend on your platform. And when your tools save them time, prevent mistakes, or let them scale without adding headcount, they become your biggest advocates.

I've seen this play out firsthand:

• One suite admin insisted on using the old platform, even though ours was faster, because our portal didn’t give her the flexibility she needed.
• A stadium refused updates during playoffs. They couldn’t risk breaking anything at the busiest time of year. 
• Finance teams wanted reporting grouped in a dozen custom ways, not just standard filters and tables. 

These aren’t edge cases. They’re warnings.

How GenAI changes the game

This shift in thinking becomes even more critical as GenAI transforms how people interact with software. In stadium tech, most operational tasks are repetitive, rules-based, and ripe for automation. With GenAI, you can:

• Allow admins to configure settings through natural language commands 
• Enable kitchen teams to update item availability using voice prompts 
• Provide real-time suggestions for missing or substitute items 
• Let finance teams ask complex reporting queries in plain English 
• Give suite managers a chatbot to prepare, track, and modify guest orders 

These capabilities reduce the need for training, eliminate friction, and free staff to focus on higher-value work. More importantly, they create real, measurable business outcomes for your clients.

GenAI gives you a chance to position your platform as an operations engine – one that pays for itself in saved hours and better guest outcomes.

Making the GenAI shift – even without AI engineers

Many companies, like ours, don't yet have dedicated AI or ML engineers. Shifting to GenAI feels like a major transformation, and it is. It’s not just about building new tech; it’s about changing the product culture, rethinking roadmaps, and preparing your engineering team for a new kind of tooling.

The good news is, you can start small:

• Use third-party APIs to prototype GenAI assistants before building in-house models
• Leverage your full stack team to build internal tooling powered by open-source LLMs 
• Partner with vendors for narrow use cases like search, reporting, or helpdesk support 
• Set up internal pilots to validate time savings and user satisfaction
• Use no-code GenAI tools to build internal assistants (e.g., payment adjusters, receipt fixers) 

Start with tools that reduce complexity for your internal users. If those succeed, you'll have data to justify deeper investments.

The GenAI shift doesn’t have to be a leap, it can be a series of smart, strategic steps. But the direction is clear. And the sooner you start moving, the faster you’ll unlock compounding value.

Building a product strategy around your real users

If operational staff are your power users and your economic buyers, your strategy needs to reflect that. Here are a few shifts to consider:

• Design for operations-first: Build for suite admins, kitchen staff, finance teams, and venue operators first. Their needs are complex, but their loyalty is long-term. 
• Reframe the value narrative: Highlight time saved, errors avoided, and staff hours reduced in your sales and marketing. 
• Introduce usage-based subscriptions: Charge for advanced operational tools instead of relying only on guest order volume. 
• Use GenAI to reduce complexity: Focus on intelligent automation, not just chatbots. Make the hard tasks easy. 
• Turn staff into advocates: When operations teams love using your product, they become the internal champions who push for renewal and expansion. 

Closing thought: Build for your most loyal users – your operations team

Hospitality tech is about people. Not just fans or guests, but the teams making everything run behind the scenes.

If you can make their lives easier even just a little, you’ve earned their trust.

The guest-facing interface may dazzle. But it’s the tools for your back-of-house team that determine whether the experience holds together.

GenAI won’t solve everything. But when used to reduce manual work and improve decision-making, it becomes a powerful lever for change.

So start there. Watch what’s happening off-screen. Build the tools they didn’t know they needed and soon won’t want to work without.

If you’re rethinking your ops strategy or experimenting with GenAI in hospitality, I’d love to hear from you – reply here or reach out on LinkedIn.

Read more great content on Mind the Product

How to deal with information overload in product management

How prompt engineering is teaching us to communicate like product leaders

Nailing your product performance review