Supercharging our Technical Product Teams: How AI and Automation are Cooking Up Efficiency at Toast

At Toast, we’re obsessed with efficiency - not just for the restaurants we serve, but for our own teams building the future of the industry. As AI coding assistants are giving engineers a massive productivity boost, a critical question emerged: How can we provide similar superpowers to our Product Managers?

The answer wasn’t to just adopt off-the-shelf tools. It was to build a smarter way to work. Spearheaded by our technical product teams leading our Foundations organization (Cloud & Service Infrastructure, AI Foundations, & Data Platform teams), we’ve launched a strategic initiative to pilot a suite of custom AI and automation tools. Our goal is to eliminate administrative overhead and empower our Technical Product Managers (PM-Ts) to focus on their most critical work: solving complex customer problems and driving product strategy.

From Documentation Toil to Strategic Focus

For any product team, translating a great idea into a detailed Product Requirements Document (PRD) is essential. But the process can create drag, involving siloed documents with complex permissions that are difficult to search and manage.

To solve this, we built a custom AI agent on our internal platform. Instead of starting with a blank page, a PM-T can now use the agent to instantly generate a comprehensive PRD, structured with our exact templates, directly within our central knowledge base. This move immediately connects product requirements to the platform our engineers live in, creating a searchable, single source of truth. The value is clear: less time spent on formatting and finding information, and more time invested in high-value activities like customer research and strategic planning.

The Efficiency Flywheel: From Internal Syncs to Customer Release Notes

The real power of our approach is how these intelligent tools work together, creating a flywheel of efficiency. Our new feature intake process captures rich, detailed information from our internal teams. That data can now be fed directly into our PRD generation agent.

But it doesn't stop there. When a feature is ready for release, the same verified information from the PRD can be used to seed a draft for our communications agent, which generates templated announcements for betas, releases, and updates.

This interconnected system dramatically reduces manual, repetitive data entry. PM-Ts are no longer copy-pasting between platforms, which minimizes errors and collapses the time it takes to get from concept to communication. It ensures messaging is consistent and frees our product team to think about the impact of the announcement, not just the mechanics of writing it.

And the flywheel extends all the way to our customers. The final, critical step in any release is telling our customers what’s new. To ensure this happens in a timely and accurate manner, we built another specialized agent focused solely on generating customer-facing release notes. When a team moves their work to a "Launched" status in our system, it automatically triggers this agent. Using a predefined template, the agent drafts the release notes, pulling key details from the completed work.

This automation ensures that as soon as a feature is live in our POS, our customers can be made aware of the change. It closes the loop between development and customer value, guaranteeing that the hard work of our teams is communicated clearly and professionally, every single time.

Bridging the Gap from Planning to Building

One of the most crucial handoffs in product development is translating a finalized PRD into actionable tasks for engineering. This has historically been a manual process of creating engineering tasks within our internal tools, risking information gaps and consuming valuable engineering time.

We are now incorporating AI that bridges this gap. Our tools can analyze a structured PRD in our knowledge base and automatically generate the corresponding engineering tasks, pre-populated with details and linked back to the source document. For our engineers, this means less administrative setup and more time building. For PM-Ts, it means greater accuracy and a faster, more seamless transition from planning to execution. This automation ensures our product and engineering teams are perfectly in sync, accelerating our development cycles.

The Future is Focused, Fast, and Creative

At Toast, we see AI and automation as the key to unlocking the full creative and strategic potential of our teams. By pioneering these tools with our technical product groups, we are proving a new model for work - one where our Technical Product Managers gain productivity on par with their engineering counterparts.

We're even using advanced large language models to help us refine and improve the instructions for our own AI agents, creating a cycle of continuous improvement. This isn't just about doing things faster; it's about creating the space for deeper thinking, more ambitious ideas, and ultimately, delivering more value to the restaurant community we serve.

This is just the beginning. Stay tuned as we continue to learn and cook up new ways to build a more intelligent and innovative future at Toast.

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