Talking With Garrett Tietjen, Labor Product Manager

If you’ve used our restaurant labor tools, you’ve experienced Garrett Tietjen and his team's work. Garrett is our Labor Product Manager, and we talked to him about his role.

Garrett, the product teams are always cooking up great stuff that our customers love. Can you describe a recent win for your team?

A recent win? We’ve worked hard to refine our scaled agile process, a framework for how our team operates. The process enables guidelines for refining efforts, planning, task management, and 2-week sprints, where the entire team agrees on the work to be completed over the following 2 weeks. During a sprint, we have a daily 'scrum', where each team member updates the team with what they accomplished and what they are working on next, and then at the end we show the work to all internal stakeholders for feedback. All of this has dramatically sped up how quickly we create new features and solutions -- and ensures a top-notch outcome.

Why did you choose to work at CrunchTime?

I was in hotel F&B management for a few years after college. Then I went for my MBA at Babson where I met two CrunchTimers -- and I joined them! My career here has gone from Product Specialist to Quality Assurance to Business Analyst and now I’m a Product Manager.

Wow, that's a nice career trajectory. So, what are some challenges your team is facing currently?

Number 1 is the ever-changing labor rule environment. Cities and states are constantly coming up with new labor rules and regulations, especially in the Fair Workweek category, and we have to capture them. At the same time, we have to keep the code flexible enough to allow for changes later. We've been very successful at this.

What are your responsibilities as a Product Manager?

I guide the planning and direction for our Labor products; things like time-clock features, labor rules, labor reporting, and employee payroll exports. Most people think of scheduling when they think of labor, but there's a lot more than just schedules on the labor side of operations. It's a very complex area of restaurant operations management and the best technology solutions are the ones that have a very thoughtful approach to product application design, user experience, and implementation for scale.

What does your day to day job consist of?

I sit down and look at my to-do list, and a lot of the time I end up working on stuff that’s not even on there! Instead I end up working with our Customer Success team, talking to developers, doing training; that always-changing role is part of the allure of this job.

If you could tell our clients anything about the work you do, what would it be?

I wish people could see how much work and care goes into even the smallest of features. When you touch one thing in a CrunchTime application, there’s a tremendous ripple effect, and we need to analyze downstream implications. For example, a new Labor Rule has significant impacts on audits, reporting, and payroll. The dedication and commitment that the team has to shipping a great product, and checking all the boxes along the way, is amazing.

What's your favorite CrunchTime moment so far when working with our customers?

Participating in my first Control User Conference was an eye opener for me. It was great to put a face to the names I had worked with for years and the enthusiasm from CrunchTime’s clients energized me. It was especially great to see so many people excited to use the solutions we were building, and to get live feedback and opinions.

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Do you want to join the CrunchTime team? We're hiring!