Aude Moras: How empathy drives product innovation

Building products that connect with people requires curiosity, empathy, and humility, says TableCheck's Head of Product

TableCheck

TableCheck

Jul 31, 2024 - 2 min read

Aude Moras: How empathy drives product innovation

“Product Management sits on the sweet spot where business, customer, and technology intersect," explains Aude Moras, Head of Product at TableCheck. "Business represents the vision and strategy; customer, the stakeholders' pains and needs; and technology drives the development of the product that reconciles both," she adds.

Moras plays a pivotal role in orchestrating strategic product innovation at TableCheck. She builds TableCheck’s product roadmap, aligning it with the company’s mission and vision, ensuring that it synergizes with diverse teams – sales, marketing, and operations – while championing solutions that keep customers at the core of each product development.

She leads a dynamic team of product managers and designers to deliver products that foster synergy among departments while resonating with TableCheck's valued customers.

“The role of our product managers is to bridge the gap between TableCheck's company vision and the direction our company wants to go, as well as our customers and the problems they have to solve," she says.

"We always have to ask these questions: 'Are we working on the right priorities?', 'Is there anything that we need to pivot from?', 'Are we anticipating the future of our business?'. Additionally, we also have to see what's happening in different markets.

"Product Management is a juggling act," she stresses.

Aude Moras
Aude Moras speaking at an IHG conference in Australia in 2023

Empathy as a driver of TableCheck's product success

TableCheck is a global platform built to help restaurants own their guest experience and control their data, while also connecting them directly with their guests.

By using a customer-centric approach in product development, TableCheck has come up with comprehensive and integrated restaurant and hospitality solutions such as TableCheck EDM, a marketing automation feature, and TableCheck Insight, a powerful data analytics tool, as well as many other features to help restaurants enhance their guest experience and respond to the changing needs of their users.

When building products for TableCheck's customers, Moras makes sure that her team never forgets three crucial attributes:

“The top skill that I look for in recruits in my team is curiosity. If you are not curious and fail to ask questions, you will miss the core problem: understanding exactly what we need to assist our customers.

“It's vital to have empathy. Consider the customer's point of view: Put yourself in the shoes of the person you are trying to assist and understand it from their standpoint."

For Moras, practicing humility is equally important.

"If you succeed as a product manager, it's because everybody was working as a team to make it happen. You must have the humility to realize that success is a result of teamwork."

Empowering merchant success: Our distinctive approach

TableCheck started as a Japanese tech company in 2011. Today it serves more than 10,000+ clients in 35 countries, with branch offices in Singapore, Dubai, Seoul, Jakarta, and Bangkok. 

"What is truly remarkable is the appetite for growth that TableCheck has. The fact that TableCheck is a Japanese company that has succeeded outside of Japan and has grown tremendously in the past few years outside of Japan is a distinctive factor," she says.

For Moras, this is a testament that people realize that TableCheck is "here to help merchants and hotels succeed."

“Through our "Dining Connected" vision, we help bridge the gap between restaurants and diners. It’s these amazing dynamics of B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumers) that make working in TableCheck unique and challenging,” reveals Moras.

“We help merchants build a better relationship with their diners and get into this virtuous loop, where diners feel that they are connected with merchants and come back directly to them without going through an OTA (online travel agency).”

Moras emphasizes that having merchants’ success at heart is really at the core of TableCheck's vision of creating a Dining Connected ecosystem for restaurants.

“We want them to grow their businesses and their revenue.”

Own the guest journey

TableCheck is a restaurant booking and guest experience platform used by Michelin-starred restaurants and top hospitality brands such as Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG. TableCheck has set new standards for restaurant management tools in Japan and is steadily growing to become the world’s leader as a restaurant reservation platform.

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