22 stories
Covid-19 survival guide for restaurants: 18 tactics to see it through

08 April 2020

Covid-19 survival guide for restaurants: 18 tactics to see it through

Some people say this corona crisis is awesome. At last, you can officially work from home. You can improve your cooking, spend time with your kids, finish that online course in French literature... Don't trust people saying that. They are lying.This corona crisis sucks. People will die, lose their jobs, go bankrupt... And even if they don't, they can't go about their lives as usual.

So it sucks for anyone, but for everyone in the food service business, it sucks big time.

What can we do?

I reached out to my network of restaurateurs and QSR professionals asking...

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06 March 2019

A customer in Moscow ordered our pizza and specified that he wanted to pay on delivery with a credit card. Our courier delivered the pizza but forgot to bring a POS terminal with him. What did he do? He couldn’t accept payment, so he left and took a hot pizza with him, leaving a hungry and disappointed customer without it.

Is it the courier’s fault? He was polite and acted according to what his common sense told him; no payment, no pizza. I think, in those countries where the competition is really fierce, it’s hard to imagine such an incident, because common sense tells everybody, from a courier to a pizza maker, that losing a customer is much worse than losing a pizza.

So whose mistake was that? Ours. We haven’t instilled our principles into the courier. He didn’t know what to do in this situation (give the pizza to the customer, and then come back with a POS terminal). We have strict standards in our kitchens, but in our customer relationships, only principles, because relationships cannot be standardized. We trust our customers. They are always our first priority, and for us, in any dispute, a customer is always right, even if it’s a customer who’s made a mistake. We work for our customers.

So, what did we learn from this incident? That the principles of our company should be impressed on all our employees more clearly. It’s not that simple, because we already have more than 15,000 employees in our chain. And now I realize that we haven’t done it so well. We have our Dodo Book, that’s true, but currently we don’t have a clear and simple list of principles we should repeat over and over again, mantra-like, so it would be impossible not to know them. And we’re going to rectify that.

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Why Does Dodo Pizza Need 250 Developers?

19 February 2019

Why Does Dodo Pizza Need 250 Developers?

In autumn, we announced we were going to expand our IT team from 49 to 250 developers. And immediately we were buried under an avalanche of questions—mostly, people were interested why a pizza chain needs so many software engineers. How did we come up with such a number? So now I want to answer that.

As you may know, Dodo Pizza is a franchise. Currently, we have more than 450 pizzerias in 12 countries, including the USA, UK, and China. The core of our franchise is Dodo IS, our information system that controls most of the business processes...

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Sprint Review: Shitty to Great

28 January 2019

Sprint Review: Shitty to Great

Our first attempt to introduce sprint reviews at Dodo Pizza failed spectacularly. You would think, perhaps, that a pizza chain doesn’t need Scrum practices at all. However, strange as it may seem, one of the key advantages of Dodo Pizza is its own IT system that controls all the working processes of 430+ pizzerias in 11 countries.

More than 60 programmers and analysts work on our system now, and we’re planning to increase that number to more than 200. Like any fast-growing start-up, we are aiming for maximum efficiency, so we use Agile frameworks a lot, including Scrum, LeSS,...

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The Founder’s Feed: 10 Leadership Principles of Dodo

22 January 2019

The Founder’s Feed: 10 Leadership Principles of Dodo

I’ve created a “founder’s channel” in our corporate Slack where I will write about our company principles and structure and gather feedback from my colleagues. Based on these notes, we will write a comprehensive memorandum on our organization and paradigm. Some of these notes will be published here as well. My first article is about Dodo’s general leadership principles.

What do I mean by that? Well, as far as I’m concerned, these are the key points of our philosophy on which our company leaders should act. I’ve spent a lot of time weighing my...

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