I love working on systems; it’s why I keep working on the internal tooling side of engineering orgs. There are unlimited tweaks you can make, and your primary customer is one Slack huddle away. This week, I found a new system that seems insane and is one of the more unique systems I think I’ve ever come across. That system is the Magic Marker system from Waffle House.
Waffle House somehow managed to create a universal menu language from scratch, using only the items in their restaurants. They’re using the system to make sure everybody is on the same page, everybody understands the same system across all of their locations, and even in the chaos of a bustling restaurant, they can flawlessly keep orders coming out of the kitchen.
No tickets needed, no deciphering speedy scrawls, pure efficiency. Waffle House has hundreds of locations in the U.S., and every single one follows the same system.
I’ll give you the short version because again, even I don’t fully understand exactly what’s happening. The Magic Marker system at Waffle House is about teeing up an order by arranging items on a plate like some sort of Guy Fieri fryomancer.
You place items (like jelly packets) on the plate to then indicate “here is what I need you to cook and how”, all the way down to how eggs are prepared (scrambled, over easy, over hard, etc). The placement of an item on the plate dictates how those eggs or that item will be cooked. It’s pretty ingenious, and seems a little insane (as with most great ideas).
Here’s the training video for the system, and a quote pull to give you a sense of what we’re dealing with.
Cheese omelet or a mushroom omelet: these are marked using a horizontal jelly packet in the number four position and a piece of the corresponding ingredient. Here you can see a cheese omelet also the Fiesta omelet which is indicated by a horizontal jelly pack with a right side up salad dressing.
If that sounds like nonsense, you’re right, but that’s also because you haven’t been onboarded appropriately.
Unwritten Rules
There are a lot of unwritten rules and micro-habits in organizations. I’ve recently gotten to onboard a few engineers at Trellis, and it’s interesting to try to figure out what all of those unwritten rules are and if we’ve appropriately written them down, or codified them. How do we create our own Magic Marker system so that new folks can learn quickly and slot right in within the team?
Especially in startups, you grow your teams because you are feeling the strain of too many problems, not enough people. As soon as someone walks in the door, you want to hand them a problem to begin reducing risk. Waffle House reminds us that while you may want to get your new hire involved right away, you have to teach them the system first.
We have language, but I think the beauty of this system, and the beauty of some of these more bespoke rules, are that it surpasses that. It gives you a quick chance to review and visually understand what something means. Think of this as architecture diagrams, or Loom walkthroughs showing every step in the path of your system, connecting the concept, the visual element, the code itself, and the data.
Other things to note are the visual queues a new hire is likely to see. We use 👀 reactjis in Slack to show we’ve seen something. Some orgs it ends there, but we know we mean “I’ve seen it and am taking action.” If there is both a 👀 reactji and a ✅ reactji, it means I’ve seen this, and we’re good to go. Even then we’ll usually add some notes with proof of why we’re good to go.
Consider how you’re arranging the plates at work and be sure to jot down the system so others can easily review and adapt.
Regardless of how bizarre the system seems, you have to write it down and you have to be able to get that information out and understandable to other people that will join your organization. Instead of having different words for things, a symbol can sometimes be enough.
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System Flexibility
Similar to the systems and rules that we build for both organizations and in software, the system also has to be flexible in case something changes in the future.
Think about current state of Waffle House. I’m no Waffle House expert, but the menu probably hasn’t changed much across its existence. Once you have the menu, it’s pretty set. In a fairly unchanging system, the Magic Marker method works great. But what if Waffle House added 18 new menu items. Could the current system handle the items? What would break?
Thankfully for Waffle House, their system creators were savants and each item has multiple dimensions, with different meanings for upside down, rotated horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, and stacked on top of each other. The system is flexible
Reactjis give a similar flexibility, especially because you can add more to your Slack workspace without issue. As the system evolves, so to will the documents that highlight that evolution. Your system won’t be perfect on the first go, nor should it be. I follow the “aim small, miss small,” method of people systems which lets you reap rewards without major change management overhead.
Try something new out this week, look at your communication channels and see where items are dropping. Is there a visual signal you can add that helps your team know immediately what to do with that item? It might not be as efficient as upside down butter on a plate, but we all have to start somewhere.
I’ll leave you with one more, because I’m still amazed and horrified.
Butter next to a jelly packet = biscuit
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