Working with Soup and Bread over the past few weeks has been an interesting challenge to say the least. With no prior knowledge of the fast casual industry, this was a far cry from the typical CS assignment. After all, as a restaurant that sells soup and bread, there did not seem to be much of a technological focus, aside from the issues with Soup and Bread’s POS and outdated website.
Despite this, I have come to learn a lot through diagnosing Soup and Bread’s deepest issues and attempting to formulate solutions to help keep Soup and Bread alive. While there were many niche problems that Soup and Bread faced, from its plateauing sales to its lack of a real tech stack, our team found it difficult to propose one definitive solution to help this restaurant chain turn itself around. As a result, we opted to create several smaller solutions to tackle Soup and Bread’s challenges with a multi-pronged approach. Admittedly, this took a loooooot of brainstorming and iterating over ideas. Throughout this, needfinding has been a key tool in developing our approach. From interviewing people in real life about their eating habits and soup preferences, I learned a lot about how different individuals come with their own backgrounds and perspectives, all of which can be immensely useful in determining how to best serve a customer base.
Certainly, I got a lot of enjoyment from roleplaying a product manager for this company. Since Soup and Bread lacked a truly life-threatening, earth-shattering problem (aside from not growing as fast as it may have wanted), we had a lot of freedom in terms of our approach to problem-solving and the solutions we could ultimately work towards. Did we want to focus on the tech side of things? The operational side of things? The strategic side of things? It helped me better understand what exactly the role of a product manager entails, which is honestly a little bit of everything. Having this company thrust upon us at the beginning of the quarter, we did our best to learn as much about the fast casual dining industry as possible, which was an endeavor in and of itself.
It has been interesting to work on this project, especially considering that our company is quite unique among all of the other companies whose pitches we listened to last week. Soup and Bread does not have grand visions of world domination—rather, it is wholly focused on maintaining that close-to-home feeling of the Pacific Northwest in a way that captivates its existing customer base. My only hope is that Soup and Bread can bring that same charm to urban Oregon. I would love to see a world where Soup and Bread could really thrive.
But for now, I want some soup.
