I want to tell you about a pizza place. Not because the pizza is incredible — though it is — but because it taught me something about what it actually means to care about your customers.

Finding the spot

Back in 2021, a friend told me about a place that had won best New York slice on the East Coast. It was at the Galleria in Tysons Corner — five minutes from where we lived. We had to try it.

We were thoroughly impressed. And then we kept going back.

Andy's became the place. We celebrated birthdays there. We toasted career wins. We showed up after bad days because sometimes you just need a slice and a beer and a booth where nobody's going to bother you. Through COVID, through everything — Andy's was the constant.

We got to know the staff. The manager at the Galleria location would ask us about our experience, share his favorites off the beer menu — genuinely great guy all around. Through those conversations, we started hearing about the legend himself — Andy. His attention to detail. His obsession with the dough. The way he thought about every part of the customer experience. I knew I had to meet this guy.

The other side of the counter

A couple years later, I joined Square as an iOS engineer. Square — the POS system used by millions of merchants across the country, including Andy's Pizza.

At Square I got to meet a lot of merchants and learn about their day-to-day. I moved to Arlington and started going to the Andy's near me. I'd stop in coming back from golf, after the bar, hanging out with friends. It became another home base — a place I could always return to.

One day I asked the cashiers how their experience had been with Square.

To my surprise, they said: "We hate it."

You guys keep changing things on us. Items are configured weirdly. There are all these issues. They weren't angry exactly — they were tired. They'd been dealing with it and had given up on anyone fixing it.

I told them I worked at Square and could take their feedback. They kind of shrugged. They didn't think some guy ordering a pepperoni slice was going to change anything at a company with thousands of engineers. They were, I'd say, indifferent.

The broken register

Then one day I walked in and the guy at the register stopped me before I could even order.

"Dude! The POS is broken. It's causing us so many issues. Can you fix this? This is messed up."

He pulled out his phone and showed me a video. The issue: when they processed a cash payment, the screen wasn't showing the remaining change. For a quick-serve pizza place, this was a disaster. Every cash transaction meant the cashier had to do mental math on the spot to make change, or dig through the POS trying to find the amount. It slowed down the line. It frustrated the staff. It frustrated the customers.

A small change had disrupted their most critical flow.

I went home that night and dug into our logs. I spun up a few investigations in parallel to figure out if we'd made a recent change that could've caused this. Turns out, we had recently migrated a batch of merchants to a new configuration, and the migration had auto-enabled a partial feature that broke the change display on checkout.

I went back to Andy's and explained what happened. I showed them how to manually toggle the setting off. It took about thirty seconds.

They were ecstatic. Here's the thing — Andy's is a big merchant. They had their own account reps talking to Square reps, and nobody had been able to figure this out. But some regular who happened to work there traced it to a config migration in an evening.

I took the feedback back to my team and our PM. I explained the flow, the impact, how a seemingly minor migration had broken a critical path for quick-serve restaurants. I remember the feeling when we actually cut work for the fix. I made this happen. I'm personally helping make my favorite pizza place better.

That's when it clicked for me. Customer obsession isn't an abstract principle you put on a company values slide. It's knowing the name of the cashier whose shift gets harder when your deploy breaks something. It's eating the pizza that gets made slower when your checkout flow adds three seconds of mental math. It's caring because the impact is real and it's standing right in front of you.

Meeting the legend

A few months later, I got to meet Andy himself. My coworker Ali set up time with him through Square. She deserves a massive shoutout here — I'd been talking about wanting to meet Andy for ages, but I know I wouldn't have acted on it. Ali found him on Reddit, emailed him, and made it happen for both of us. She went above and beyond. What an amazing friend. She always says it's crazy that we've only been friends for a year, but it really does feel like a lifetime.

We walked in expecting a standard seller visit. The kind where you sit down and hear about everything that's wrong with your terminals. Instead, we told Andy how much we loved the pizza and he said:

"Do you guys wanna come in the back and make some pizza?"

Hell yeah we did.

The Andy's Pizza kitchen crew making pizza — sauce, dough, and smiles

Andy showed us everything. How the dough is made. How it's stretched. The technique, the timing, the feel of it. He gave us the whole secret to his success, right there in the kitchen. And you could see it immediately — while the rest of us were fumbling with the dough, Andy was in a completely different zone. He wasn't just making pizza. He was in love with making pizza.

Andy standing proudly next to a fresh pizza he just made

He told us he thinks about dough all the time. That he goes to sleep thinking about pizza dough. How he'd be up all night in his basement experimenting with hydration levels and fermentation times, and his wife would come downstairs and say, "Not this again!"

That's it. That's the whole thing. The dedication, the commitment, the genuine love for the craft. Andy doesn't make great pizza because he followed a recipe. He makes great pizza because he can't stop thinking about how to make it better.

A fresh pizza straight out of the oven at Andy's Pizza Sameer grinning with two slices of Andy's pizza

What I took away

I think about Andy a lot when I'm building software.

Most engineers interact with their users through dashboards and metrics. Conversion rates, session durations, crash-free percentages. Those numbers are important, but they're abstractions. They don't tell you about the cashier who's stressed because your checkout flow is broken during the Friday night rush. They don't tell you about the manager who spent two hours on a support call and gave up.

The best products are built by people who eat at the restaurant. Who use the thing they're building in the context where it actually matters. Who know their customers not as personas in a product doc, but as people with names and frustrations and a line out the door.

Andy obsesses over dough because he cares about every single slice that leaves his kitchen. The least I can do is care about every single screen that leaves mine.