Tapback — the restaurant-tech rebuild now landing in Saudi Arabia.

What I joined

Tapback came to me through Xanadu — restaurant-tech with active customers but a product surface that hadn’t kept up with what those customers actually needed. The pattern was the one most early-stage SaaS hits in F&B: the operators were running across five different service providers because none of them, including Tapback, did everything well enough to consolidate. The opportunity was to be the one system the customer could actually use end-to-end, but only if the product could earn that role.

What we built

The core product got revamped across two major capability lines.

Table reservation. In other companies — OpenTable, Resy — table reservation is its own product, with its own funding rounds and its own brand. Building it as a feature inside Tapback meant being honest about what restaurants actually use, stripping out the layers that don’t apply to small-and-mid-sized operators, and integrating cleanly with the rest of the platform.

Pre-order. Letting customers order ahead and have food ready when they arrive sounds simple until you build it: kitchen flow, staff allocation, payment timing, fulfilment edge cases. We shipped it as a real first-class capability rather than a half-feature.

The revenue model was reshaped alongside the product work. The previous model wasn’t aligned with how customers were actually using the platform, which created friction at every renewal conversation. The new model matched usage to value more directly — the kind of change that makes the next year’s renewals easier than the last year’s.

How we built it

The way the team was shipping needed work too.

We moved from a two-week sprint to a one-week sprint. That doesn’t sound dramatic until you do it: the cadence forces tighter scope, sharper standups, and a backlog that has to actually be triaged rather than carried. The team’s velocity went up, partly because the false comfort of “we have another week” went away.

We also shortened the path from BRD to working prototype. The product designer could move faster when requirements arrived in a shape that translated cleanly to wireframes. We restructured the upstream artefact so that happened by default rather than by exception. Small process change, real impact on time-to-first- prototype.