Domino's became a top-performing stock not by having the best pizza, but by focusing on convenience through technology. Their app created a direct customer relationship, enabling better targeting and a smoother experience. This tech advantage transitioned into a physical world distribution and scale advantage.

To scale, Deliver needed a self-serve system for a high-stakes transaction: taking custody of a merchant's entire inventory. They achieved this by building systems that fostered trust through radical transparency, like photo evidence for discrepancies. This proved self-serve can work for complex, high-trust sales.

6AM City found that their lowest-spending advertisers often required the most sales and fulfillment effort. To solve this, they created a self-serve portal for smaller, one-off ad buys. This automated process freed their sales team from low-AOV transactions to focus on larger, regional, and national clients, dramatically improving team efficiency and revenue focus.

The most critical insights for Chili's revival came not from consumers, but from its 70,000 employees. Their feedback on operational friction and guest interactions directly fueled simplification, menu changes, and investments that improved the customer experience.

When scaling in operational companies like Walmart or Lyft, product leaders must analyze the entire P&L, not just revenue. The cost of training millions of employees on a new feature can outweigh its benefits, making frictionless, self-adopted solutions essential.

Chipotle made its popular quesadilla a digital-only menu item because it slowed down the physical service line. This highlights a critical business principle: a great marketing or product innovation that compromises the core operational efficiency of the business is ultimately a value-destructive idea and must be modified or rejected.

Driven by demands for convenience, contactless culture, and automation, businesses are moving beyond traditional service counters. The rise of vending machines for diverse products like prescriptions, cars, and champagne signifies a broader economic shift toward a self-service "kiosk economy."

Building a fully self-serve product doesn't just cater to small customers. Companies like Square and Figma found that large, sophisticated users often prefer to sign up and explore advanced features on their own. This creates a powerful bottom-up adoption wedge inside large organizations, bypassing traditional top-down sales.

When serving a complex value chain, internal operational efficiency is not just a background task. Inefficient internal processes can completely break the customer experience, making features for internal teams (e.g., operations, procurement) just as high-priority as those facing the end customer.