Go Slow, Then Go Fast: The Restaurant Tech Deployment Playbook

Every week, I talk to restaurant operators who are frustrated with their technology. Adoption is low. Guests are complaining. The ROI they were promised never materialized. And almost every time, the problem isn't the technology itself—it's how they approached deploying it.

After years of watching brands get this right and wrong, I've come to believe there's one principle that separates the operators crushing it with their tech investments from the ones leaving money on the table: go slow, then go fast. It sounds simple. It isn't.

The biggest mistake I see operators make is treating technology selection like a box to check. They sit through a polished demo, get excited, and greenlight a rollout without ever actually living in the product themselves.

If you're evaluating a loyalty program, download every competing app on the market. Place orders. Earn points. Redeem rewards. Do it dozens of times until the experience is second nature. If you're adding kiosks, stand at one and order every combination on your menu. Find the friction points yourself before your guests do.

Your guests will absolutely encounter issues you never anticipated. The question is whether you find them first or they do. Being the toughest critic of your own tech stack isn't pessimism—it's your job. Don't make your guests your beta testers.

Beyond the user experience, be deliberate about who you're partnering with. Vet the company, not just the product. A great solution from the wrong partner can derail even the best-laid rollout plans.

This is what "going slow" means. It's not timid—it's disciplined.

Here's where most operators fall apart on the other end of the spectrum.

A brand pilots new technology at one or two locations. It works. The results are there. And then... they sit on it. They spend months deliberating over edge cases and minor process tweaks while 50 other locations continue to miss out on the ROI they've already proven is real.

It's one of the most maddening things I see in this industry.

Once you've done the hard work of selecting the right solution and validating that it delivers, your only job is to scale—fast. Every week you delay deployment is a week of lost revenue. Every month of over-deliberation is a month your competitors are pulling ahead.

The best operators I know don't let perfect be the enemy of good. They deploy, they learn, they optimize, and they capture ROI quickly. That's the move.

Here's the thing about all of this—even operators who nail the selection process and move decisively to scale can still stumble if they skip one critical step: getting their team genuinely on board.

The best technology in the world delivers zero ROI if your staff doesn't embrace it. A 20-minute onboarding video isn't training. Your team needs to understand the why behind the tools they're using—how the technology makes their jobs easier, not harder.

When your staff understands that kiosks free them up to focus on hospitality instead of order-taking, or that accurate digital orders mean fewer remakes and fewer unhappy guests in their face, adoption changes. It accelerates.

We see this play out directly at Bite. The locations seeing 20% check lifts and 99% order accuracy aren't using different technology than anyone else. They've made a deeper investment in their people and their training. That's the differentiator.

If you're still evaluating technology, slow down. Do the work. Be a practitioner. Vet everything.

But if you've already done that—if you've piloted something, proven it works, and you're still sitting on it—that's not strategy. That's just leaving money on the table.

The brands winning with restaurant technology aren't using better tools. They're making smarter decisions about how to select, deploy, and scale them. And then they move.

Brandon Barton is the CEO of Bite, the leading kiosk solution built for QSR and fast casual restaurants and c-stores. Learn more at getbite.com.