Niel Cody

Product leader, hospitality software

Index 00 — Home

Softwarethat holds ona Friday night.

I spent eight years on the hospitality floor, from Michelin service to running three venues. Then I crossed the table. Today I lead product across AI, menus, insights, loyalty and inventory for a group of six point-of-sale brands.

01

The readout

Every figure traced. Nothing rounded up.

199

organisations

Customer organisations using the AI agent in its first tracked month

292 users, 788 sessions. Production telemetry, 12 Aug to 14 Sep 2026.

25×

estate

Loyalty estate growth, from under 10 bespoke apps to 250+ instances

Same product, rebuilt as configurable multi-tenant SaaS.

<1

week

Loyalty app delivery, discovery to live in the stores. It used to take weeks

Staged over roughly twelve months without dropping a commitment.

60+

sites

POS, stock and financial control rolled out across one pub group

As the implementer, three years before joining the vendor.

02

The Friday Night Test

The only rule I build by

Most hospitality software is specified by people who have never worked a Friday night.

You can tell.

It demos beautifully, then meets 8pm: a queue out the door, a jammed printer, someone off sick, and a venue manager who does not care what the roadmap said.

I learned that the hard way, running operations across three venues turning over £3.5m. Every improvement had to hold at 8pm on a Saturday or it was not an improvement. I have built software the same way since.

If it does not hold under pressure, it is not finished.

Read the essay

** FRIDAY SERVICE **

TKT #0840   COVERS 212

SERVER: THE ROADMAP

  1. 19:40Table of 12 walks in. No booking.
  2. 19:41Kitchen printer jams, mid-docket.
  3. 19:44Two staff off sick. Nobody told the roster.
  4. 19:47Card terminal drops to offline.
  5. 19:52Queue out the door. Manager on the pass.

DOES YOUR FEATURE STILL WORK?

[ ] YES[ ] NOT FINISHED

-- THANK YOU --

03

Selected work

Written as decision records

  1. 01AI, from a trade-show demo to productionAn agent that writes to a live till199Customer organisations in the first tracked month2025 — nowIn production
  2. 02Loyalty, rebuilt as configurable SaaSFrom bespoke builds to a product25×Estate growth, <10 to 250+ instances2021 — 2024Shipped
  3. 03Platform, one reporting layer for six productsThe foundation under the data strategy6Point-of-sale products, one reporting foundation2024 — nowIn flight
  4. 04Strategy, a post-mortem and a new cascadeRebuilding how a company sets goalsQ1Ahead of the prior year, one quarter inFY27Adopted

04

Playground

Things I build on my own time

Don't read about it. Play with it.

Senior product people mostly show opinions. These are things I built and left up for anyone to use, with how they work, the decisions behind them, and a guide to build your own.

No. 01Recorded runs

Flagship

The Council

Put a decision in front of four hospitality operators and a chair. Get a verdict you can forward.

Convene

05

Writing

What breaks when the room is full

06

Now

Updated September 2026

At work

Making an AI agent safe enough to leave running on a Friday night, and bringing six products onto one cloud platform without breaking what venues already depend on.

On my own time

Building the Council in public: a panel of hospitality operators that fails bad ideas before a real venue has to.

Writing

A series on what breaks in hospitality software when the room is full. First round is on me.