Poke Theory — A love story.

Looking

Methods for observing human experience.
Innovation begins and ends with people. It calls for keen and caring observation.
The disciplined practice of Human-Centered Design involves careful investigation. It requires curiosity, objectivity, and empathy. You need to engage all of your senses (looking, listening, and so forth) in pursuit of meaningful findings. — LUMA Institute: Design thinking training, tools, and services

Taking a page out of Luma Playbook, I’ve decided to practice Walk-a-mile immersion. I want to experience what a frontline staff will experience on their day-to-day job routine. With some help from my co-founder, she managed to get me a position at Poke Theory, and I’ve picked the faithful day of 1st of April to start work.

Gosh. It has been such a long time since I last worked in F&B. Making my way towards the store in PLQ, I can’t help but think about the days when I was still schooling and had worked part-time in Billy Bombers and the foodcourt in Junction Eight for the extra allowance.

Upon reaching the store, I am being greeted by the amazing fragrance of — I am not sure what it is but it sure smells good. There was a slight confusion as I wasn’t made known that I am coming and the supervisor isn’t in the store yet. Some how if only there’s some kind of app *coughDayOnecough* that can help in setting up Tasks that is ready for me to take on.

“Some how if only there’s some kind of app that can help in setting up Tasks that is ready for me to take on.”

After a while, the store’s supervisor came in. I make my introduction and he begin sharing with me on the “store setting up” processes. The supervisor is an awesome guy, in no time he was up and running and teaching me the ropes. Like an excited puppy, I followed him around.

In F&B, everything is driven by processes and SOP. There’re checklist for checklists, and post-it notes are a common sight that is plastered everywhere because staff constantly needs to be reminded of the “correct” way of doing something.

Processes are strongly correlated to the bottom line as well, the smoother your workflow, the better is your revenue.

After a few hours of hard work and setting up! We are ready for business and I’ve already forgotten 92.453919% of all the things I was taught. I never knew a simple store setup consist of so many steps and procedures.

Beside store setup, there is also the “changing shift” process, where the lunch shift staff retires and the dinner shift staff takes over. And if certain processes or tasks are not done, it will certainly impact the later shift. Items need to be taken from the freezer to the bottom fridge to slowly defrost, containers need to be topped up or pre-filled and many many more. There is also a “closing shift” process, where things must be prepared for the next day.

There are no excuses, an F&B stall must run like clockwork. It is a delicate dance when one shift passes the baton to another. Everything must be squared away. This is a very SOP — Standard Operating Procedure, driven business. Processes are strongly correlated to the bottom line as well, the smoother your workflow, the better is your revenue.

There are more notes and research and hypothesis that I’ve gathered during this experience which I might share in a later post. I’ve also noted down my emotional touch points when doing certain tasks and throughout the day’s journey.

Thank you Praashant and your team for allowing me to experience working for a day in Poke Theory. This will bring immense value to what we are building in DayOne. Armed with these learning, it is a promise that we will iterate our product to work better with all frontline staff and provide value to all managers, supervisors as well as business owners like yourself.