Want to get to know our R&D team better? We sat down with Chris McKay, Head of R&D at Zonal, to talk about his role, and what it’s like working in R&D at Zonal.
What do you do at Zonal
I joined Zonal in 2023, and as Head of R&D, I’m responsible for several of the development teams in Zonal who look after all the various products across our portfolio. This ranges from our consumer-facing products like Bookings, Order and Pay, Loyalty and Vouchers as well as operational products like Payments, Table Management and Kitchen and Service Management.
What teams do you work with here at Zonal?
We get requirements coming in from the Product Management team and Account Services teams, and we also work closely with the Help Centre to ensure that that customers are getting the immediate support they need. We also work daily with DevOps, ProdOps and Security to ensure that our solutions have taken everything into consideration when we design and deliver them. Finally, we liaise with PMO and Project Services to ensure that we stay on track with delivery deadlines and other deliverables. So, we’re right in the centre of the collaboration circle across the whole business.
R&D is right in the centre of things at Zonal and we collaborate with nearly every single department.
No two days are the same in in R&D, so it’s generally a balancing act between strategic planning, people management, problem solving and project execution.
What’s your average day like?
We solve really complex challenges in R&D every day. We’ve got lots of intelligent people and my job is to support them in any way that I can, which usually involves ensuring that they’re clear on priorities and making sure they’ve got no obstacles that that hinder their productivity. I’m there to offer guidance and promote a positive working environment where those intelligent people can feel motivated to work at their best. I’m very much a people person, so I love helping people be the best that they can.
What do you enjoy?
I spend a lot of my spare time in pubs and restaurants, so it’s great to be able to see the fruits of our labour in action every day. Working on products that you actually use yourself, makes is so much more enjoyable. To the point now where, you wake up after a night out and you check all of your blurry photographs from the night before; now, I wake up and I’ve got pictures of till systems there now, so it’s nice to be able to relate to it all.
How would you describe the Zonal culture?
The main thing for me is the people and the culture. It’s a family culture which values loyalty and we foster strong relationships amongst all our employees. Everybody is united behind a common goal and it doesn’t matter which part of the organisation you work in.
Tell us about your career at Zonal so far.
I’ve only been at Zonal six months myself, so it’s probably too early to have any examples for me personally, but I already can see lots of examples of it across the business of how the opportunities arise and people can move on to the next stages in career. So in R&D for example, we’ve got Project Managers that have come from the Help Centre originally and we’ve also got some Senior Managers that started off here as Testers. So it’s it truly is a place where you can advance your career down various different avenues.
And how do you feel that you make a difference for Zonal for customers?
I think by setting priorities across our development teams, I’m able to ensure that we have the capacity planned in to deal with any kind of customer requests that comes in. This ensures that we can deliver innovative solutions to them quickly, rather than what a lot of other tech companies might do and just add it the request to a queue then they don’t really know how long it’s going to take to get serviced. We also ensure that we’ve got Product experts on hand to support customers. If there’s any technical expertise that’s needed to go under the hood of the products, we ensure that we’ve got the capacity to provide those experts to our customers.
I know it sounds cheesy, but it really is one big family all pushing in the same direction to get the best for our customers.
Zonal truly is an expert in the field. We’re made-up of people who’ve come from a hospitality background and all of us are customer obsessed. There’s a widespread attitude throughout the company that makes every customer feel like a VIP, regardless of their of their size or status.
How would you describe Zonal’s approach to understanding and meeting customer needs?
I think one thing that that that stood out to me and really impressed me was Zonal’s customer demand process and how efficient it is at getting customer requests straight to the right person and getting that serviced, so the customers essentially have a direct line right into our engineering road map through their dedicated account manager. These requests get raised with our Engineering team, and we assess and deliver those requests and all in a very short time frame, due to that really direct process that we’ve got in place.
And finally, how do you how do your team approach innovation and staying ahead of technological advancements within the hospitality sector?
Zonal has been the leader in the hospitality tech market for over 40 years and our EPoS platform is trusted as the most robust and fully-featured point of sale software on the market. What we’re trying to do is make sure obviously that we don’t rest on our laurels, and we continue to innovate and make sure that that trusted product goes to the next level, so getting that product to be fully cloud-based, it’s going to be a more versatile, robust and a powerful platform than ever before. It’ll provide access anytime, anywhere on any device. Users will have all of the tools they need in one location, updating in real time. That’s all of the elements that we’re trying to bake into to our products to make sure that we stay ahead of the curve and that product that has existed for a long time goes to the next level for our customers.
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