Seat management
Bringing order to the chaos of live, multi-guest dining.
Background
I led design for the Canadian market on Square's international product team, where we focused on growing adoption among bars, breweries, and full-service restaurants.
In 2024, we identified a significant gap in Square's Restaurant POS around seat management—a missing capability that contributed to $89M in lost GPV, notable customer churn, and direct feature requests from 19 upmarket sellers representing $142.2M in GPV. While full-service restaurants represent just 3.6% of Square's Canadian F&B sellers, they generate 25.8% of annual GPV, and nearly 97% of Canadian FSRs are not yet using Square, making this a critical growth opportunity.
Despite a strong business signal, the problem was ambiguous. Our team lacked deep familiarity with full-service restaurant workflows, and "seat management" meant something different to each seller—surfacing as a broad request rather than a clearly defined solution. The challenge was rapidly building domain knowledge while translating diverse service scenarios into a focused experience that met the expectations of experienced servers.
The problem
Square's Restaurant POS lacked essential seat management capabilities standard in the industry, creating significant operational challenges for bars, breweries, and full-service restaurants.
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Servers are forced to manage fragmented and disorganized bills
With no seat management features, servers rely on inefficient workarounds. This results in inaccurate cover counts, incorrect seat assignments, and makes bill splitting unnecessarily complex.
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Restaurants compromise their service quality by using Square
The inability to properly manage the bill creates a cascade of operational issues — from frustrated servers and limited flexibility to disrupted kitchen workflows and compromised service timing.
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Slower table turnover, delays, and dozens of extra clicks
Billing becomes an extremely long process when servers don't know who ordered what.
My role
- Translated discovery insights into a prioritized roadmap initiative, presenting findings to cross-functional partners and senior leadership
- Synthesized seller research and led multiple rounds of interviews and usability testing (including in-person) to define the problem space and validate solutions
- Led cross-functional kickoffs and ongoing stakeholder reviews, including with international and F&B org leadership
- Stepped in to support product management and beta ownership during team transitions, tracking seller usage and feedback to inform launch timing
- Collaborated with Sales, Account Management, Product Marketing, and Customer Success to align on seller needs and drive launch readiness
- Supported launch enablement by scripting and recording a public demo video and ensuring consistency across support, training, and marketing materials
The solution
Cover counts & seat mappings
Restaurants record the number of seats at a table as the number of covers, even when seats remain empty. This results in inflated cover counts and inaccurate reporting metrics.
Restaurants can track accurate cover counts while preserving correct seat mapping by dynamically adding or disabling seats.
Seat assignments & guest movements
Bill organization is broken — servers are forced to split checks to manage seats, yet items still are incorrectly assigned. Limitations prevent servers from changing seat assignments after firing or moving multiple items at once.
Managing seats no longer requires juggling multiple bills. Servers can organize everything on a single bill. Moving items between seats is simple and fast — whether a single item or an entire seat's order — and changes can be made at any time.
Guests leaving early
Servers must either split the entire table into separate checks or tediously move items one-by-one — both workarounds are time-consuming and unintuitive, especially when the rest of the table wants to continue ordering.
When guests leave early, servers can create their bill and collect payment in just three taps — eliminating the need to manage multiple bills or tediously select individual items, saving servers valuable time.
Guests moving tables
Moving seats between tables is a hassle since items stay assigned to their original seat numbers, often creating confusion with duplicate seat numbers. Cover counts don't update automatically, risking inaccurate metrics in reporting.
Moving seats between tables is seamless — the system automatically adjusts cover counts and assigns items to the next available seat number. Servers can easily reorganize items between seats at the new table if needed.
Outcomes & impact
Shipped in 2025
- Repositioned Square as a credible POS for full-service restaurants, helping win back churned sellers, close new deals, and overcome the perception that "Square isn't built for restaurants"
- Enabled restaurant sellers to work more efficiently through fewer clicks, faster seat and check adjustments, improved order accuracy, and reduced server frustration — supporting better staff satisfaction and retention
- Equipped Sales and Account Management teams with a top-requested capability, directly improving sales conversations and deal close rates
- Achieved competitive parity with leading FSR POS systems, laying the foundation for future features such as allergens and seat notes
Reflection & learnings
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Sales & AMs are essential design partners
Deep collaboration with Sales and Account Management was critical to understanding the problem space and validating impact. Their direct seller relationships helped shape milestones, informed design decisions and reinforced confidence that we were solving the right problems.
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In-person research turned uncertainty into alignment
Leading in-person seller interviews was a turning point in understanding full-service restaurant workflows. Observing live service environments — especially kitchen operations and ticket handling — revealed nuances that would have been difficult to uncover remotely and directly resolved cross-functional uncertainty around kitchen ticket and KDS behavior.
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Early, ongoing engineering collaboration pays off
This project marked a shift away from a handoff-based model toward true partnership with engineering. By bringing engineers into discovery, research, and early design discussions, we built shared understanding and empathy around real restaurant workflows. Aligning on feasibility and constraints upfront reduced downstream risk, prevented late-stage rework, and enabled more confident delivery.