How Gordon Ramsay taught me to build better products

One of the product mentors I cite the most often is Gordon Ramsay…

But what can a great chef teach someone building software products?

Well it turned out that when it comes to making people create great products, it doesn’t really matter if it is food or software.?

The principles I learned from Gordon allowed me and my team at Clerk.io to build a product that was significantly better rated than our competitors with a fraction of the team size and resources.?

So I took some time to write down my learnings to inspire you to be a better product maker and leader (software or not).

How a YouTube recommendation changed my life

A few years ago (around 2017-18 ish) Clerk.io was starting to scale and become a real company with different teams. At the time Clerk.io was around 20 people so I had been leading others for a few years and had learned the leadership basics.

One sunday after a loooong week I just needed some brain junk food and was scrolling though YouTube when it recommended some old episodes of Kitchen Nightmares. I hadn’t really seen it before other than a few clips like Amys Bakery etc so I thought this was just the stupid TV I needed to relax.

When I had seen the first episode, I just let it roll over to the next one and so on… Great Sunday!!

But around the fifth episode I started to notice something: If you look past the tv drama of it all, it is really just about great leadership and a consistent formula for creating great products.?

A formula that, when I applied it to my own company and life, was a huge step forward in what we were able to get done.

The Gordon Ramsay formula

So, what was this secret formula?

The shows always starts with Gordon arriving at a restaurant where either a leader has given up or they simply don’t listen to feedback. Then they show the shit show of a bad evening.

Then Gordon applies his secret formula:

1. First you find someone?who are passionate about food. If the head chef has lost interest, you promote a team-member or as a last resort bring in someone from the outside. No passion, no quality.

2. Then you figure out what great ingredients can be found locally. Not only can you get these super fresh but it also makes your menu more unique.

3. Then you completely slash the menu and re-introduce a few simple dishes based on simple recipes that are super easy to prep and cook. Design the work so it is easy to make great food.

4. Then it is all about maintaining high standards while serving. If the chef doesn’t taste the food while cooking, it ends up being the customers discovering when things go bad.

Below I go in depth on how I have adapted Gordons formula to my own product work.

A chef must always taste their own food

This is the single most important tip - a chef must always taste their own food all the time.?

And there are so many chefs that don’t - especially in software.

If the chef doesn’t taste the food, then there are only the customers left for discovering problems - that is exactly what you are here to avoid.

Two restaurants can make the same dish that on the menu looks the same but as a guest you can easily taste where the chef tastes their food and where they don’t. When they don’t, the food is just more bland and less exciting.

It is the same in software. You can find many products that on paper do the same but when you use them, they are miles apart. In one everything is just a bit awkward and less polished where in others it just feels so fluent.?

As a product leader you can never tell the two apart in a spec or report - you have to get your hands dirty and feel it. You have to taste your own food.

And you see this with all the best product companies - they all have extremely hands-on leaders with Apple and Linux being the absolute best at this.

After applying this myself we just shipped much, much better software.?

No dish can be served without the approval of the head chef and no feature can ship without the approval of the product lead.

Make simple recipes that are easy to prepare well

Most restaurants in Kitchen Nightmares have overly complicated menus believing that if they just have all the dishes everyone will be happy. The problem is that you can not have fresh ingredients for all those dishes so they sacrifice quality over quantity.

The same goes in software where - in an attempt to listen to customers - product leaders just implement everything instead of a great curated set of features. This leads to a lot of code to maintain and a lot of features only used by a small customers base making it hard to justify building them.

What Gordon does is always simplifying the menu.?

Not only are the number of items drastically reduced but the thought behind each item is that is it easy to prep in the afternoon before serving starts, making it easier for less experienced chefs to deliver high quality food quickly.

Gordon sets up the team for success.

This is also the key responsibility of a product leader. Many fail their team by just giving the briefest of outlines (and I have done this plenty as well) but your key task is identifying an efficient way for your team to build the feature.

This includes a clearly defined scope of must-haves and nice-to-haves and an overall proposal of getting this done. It does not mean that your team must follow that. If they figure out something better then they should do that. But providing clear guidance you set them up for success by giving them at least one good way to solve the task at hand.

Find your fresh local ingredients

Every time Gordon makes a new menu he always goes out of the way to find out what local and fresh ingredients he can use. This is not only because fresh ingredients makes for better food. It also creates a better story and a clear differentiation. Why should you even come here if you just use the same ingredients as everyone else?

In product teams and companies we also have our own unique local things we excel at.

As product leaders we should always be super aware of what these local ingredients are. What are we uniquely good at? If you can’t answer that as a product lead then how can you do your best job? Then you are just like the chef that doesn’t know the good local ingredients.

What you are uniquely good at is usually why your existing customers have chosen you over your competition. You need to double down on this to deepen your moat.

Eg. in Clerk.io our core AI was really really good at predicting the right products without any human guidance. That means that we doubled down on features that relied on this automation. We even postponed feature requests that allowed more human manipulation of the results until we had a great way to do this without losing our uniqueness.?

It is this awareness and the following choices of what and how to do things - and importantly what not to do - that define great product leaders.

How to apply this?

Well this is all neat and dandy but how have I used this in practice?

I usually apply them in the reverse order of appearance here.

First, you as a leader has to know your uniqueness. It is what has to shape all your product decisions. If you don’t clearly know, then use time with founders, customers, colleagues and your team to understand what you have that the competition don’t.

When you know that, then you have to get good at writing outlines for new features. Think them through before you delegate to the team so you at least see one clear path to the goal. The most important thing here is defining the sub-components of the feature and separating what is must-haves and nice-to-haves. This creates clarity for your team and makes it so much more likely that they will deliver the feature successfully on time.

Lastly, you need to get your hands dirty with all new features and improvements before they go into production. Many leaders argue they don’t have the time but doing this up-front saves you much, much more time than it takes.?

A great way to make this easier is by making your team taste their own food before you do. For each pull request have them add a loom video where they demo their feature and why this is the best version and their code and why this is the best way to solve this. This drastically increases the quality of thing you see and make your life so much easier.

And in the end customers get better features faster than any other way of working I have seen.

Summary

So in short here is what I learned from Gordon Ramsay that has allowed me to build drastically better products:

1. Always taste your own food. When you are at a restaurant where the chef tastes the food, you know and when you use a product where the product leads use the product, you know.

2. Set you team up for success by making simple recipes. You as a leader should help find the easiest way to get the work done. Don’t let them stray alone.

3. Know your unique ingredients. If you don’t have a clear knowledge of your products, teams and companys uniqueness then you will only make bland products just as a chef that doesn’t know their great local ingredients will only make bland food.

I hope this helped you. Now I can only recommend you spending some downtime watching Kitchen Nightmares to improve your product leadership skills.