Based in Boston, Toast is an all-in-one restaurant point of sale and management platform, offering a suite of hardware and software products that handle everything from payment processing and payroll to reservations and online ordering. Restaurants around the country rely on Toast to help them improve operations, increase sales, and create a better guest experience.
To stay competitive, the technology company is constantly innovating and offering new products. When it launched Toast Tables Experiences—which allows restaurants to create specialized, bookable events (like brunch specials, tasting menus, or holiday parties) on its platform—the adoption rate was lower than expected. To find out why and what to do to increase it, Toast turned to a team of MIT Sloan Product Management Lab (PM-Lab) students.
However, from the beginning of the project, the MIT team ran into a challenge: recruiting restaurant operators for user research. Their ability to generate meaningful insights depended on speaking directly with end users, but restaurant operators are incredibly busy and often hard to reach. The students approached the problem by engaging with cross-functional team members across Toast to test different strategies, from scaling outbound messaging, to offering financial incentives, to visiting restaurants in-person in the Boston area and leveraging existing relationships.
“By diversifying our outreach and meeting users where they were, we were able to build a strong set of interviews and ground our insights in real customer needs,” says Justin Spar, MBA ’27. “We even got buy-in on restaurants who were willing to have additional conversations with us for the future.”
Building a product for the customer, with the customer
Tackling this challenge and overcoming it provided the whole team with an invaluable lesson.
“Our biggest takeaway was that building the right product alongside the customer is just as important, if not more important, than building a great product,” says Spar. “It reinforced that great product management starts with the customer and requires a deep understanding of their needs and business challenges before jumping to solutions.”
This experience solidified my belief that great products aren't just built on features, but on the buy-in of every stakeholder. It has truly sparked my passion for simplifying restaurant operations through intentional, user-centric design.
For Shiyu Su, LGO ’26, the overall experience transformed how she understands product management, the career path she is pursuing.
“It solidified my passion for product management by showing me how data-driven insights can solve real-world business challenges. It also provided me with a high-level view of the agile, fast-paced nature of a startup environment, where adaptability is key. But most importantly, it taught me the value of customer-centricity."
I now understand that building a great product begins and ends with a deep, empathetic connection to the person using it.
Megan Shi, MBA ’27 agrees: "Observing this process reinforced how much rigor and empathy go into effective product management.”
Navigating ambiguity in product management
Like all PM-Lab projects, this one gave students the opportunity to work on a real product problem with real users, gaining hands-on skills, insights, and industry connections.
[PM-Lab] pushed me to navigate ambiguity, collaborate cross functionally, and make decisions with imperfect information, all of which are difficult to replicate in a classroom setting. It also strengthened my interest in pursuing product management as a career and gave me the relationships, experience, and conviction to take that next step.
Understanding and improving the customer experience
The PM-Lab project was valuable to the MIT team in many ways, but also to Toast.
This project accelerated our understanding of the reasons customers are adopting, and not yet adopting, Toast Tables experiences. The project met our needs, and gave us actionable recommendations and next steps that we're currently executing against.
Barnes, an MIT Sloan alum, says the company plans to implement the changes the team recommended on how Toast Tables experiences are set up for restaurants, including a detailed prototype and walk through. “This gave us more conviction to accelerate building our new Toast Tables ticketing product, which will be launching in the coming months.”
