Product Owner Stuart Graham

What attracted you to working for Flow Hospitality and the Mapal group?

I started in my role at Flow Hospitality just 3 weeks ago and similar to Sergio I loved the idea of a smaller company in a growth phase. Like Flow, my last company was a hospitality software company that had grown out of a need from the owner’s own venue in Edinburgh. It seemed like a really good time to come in and grow with Flow and Mapal as they have really exciting growth plans, so from that perspective it was a no brainer.

Tell us about your role as a product Owner – what does your role entail?

I like to describe it as the conduit between business and technology. So I will sit within the product delivery team with all the techies but I will go out and talk to our customers, our own customer success team, and the sales team to know exactly what the customer needs and wants are so I can start to put things into our product roadmap. I look at it from a very high level, then funnel everything down to where the development team start working on all the separate pieces, and work out how we actually make it a feature of the product.

What are you most excited to start working on?

For me my focus is currently the Flow Learning solution and I am really interested in the way that people want to learn and the whole experience with Flow. I feel that we can turn it into a learning experience platform than your traditional learning management system, where people are actually looking for their own learning and have the right content available to them. 
I’ve come in at an exciting time where we are changing the way Flow looks, we’re changing the way the Mapal products look and I’m keen to see what that means from a user experience point of view. With the Mapal products, Flow and Cloud reputation we can now take care of almost everything back of house.

What product trends do you think are specific to hospitality?

With COVID19 coming in everything needs to be quicker, faster and more adaptable than ever before. Nothing can take months or weeks even, to start being worked on. When something changes or someone needs to learn how to do something this is such a fast paced industry anyways that we need to be at the forefront of that change, anticipating the needs of our customers so that we can deploy it as soon as they need it. At flow hospitality we need to be at the cutting edge of training content as service standards are completely different to the way they used to be, everything needs to be contactless and our hospitality content and platform needs to reflect that, whether it be training content or changes in shift patterns.