In this interview, Polina Popadenko, a Technical Program Manager with Dev.Pro, shares her first-hand insights into how AI is transforming the retail, restaurant, and hospitality industries. In a conversation with Dev.Pro’s Marketing Project Manager, Daryna Kutova, and Content Lead, Diana Papirovnik, she explains the importance of fostering cohesion and efficiency in IT teams, no matter the industry.

About Polina: Polina began her journey in IT working on mobile app development before moving on to overseeing reporting teams and mobile ordering solutions. Over seven years, she’s built up a comprehensive understanding of how IT teams function in the retail, hospitality, and restaurant industries.

Are there basic elements of good project management that apply to all industries?

Polina: No matter the industry, some things are always the same, like the need to set clear goals for the team. There are plenty of tools you can use: key value results, sprint goals, etc. Any format you agree upon with your team — anything that works for all of you — will do. The important thing is that these goals are well-defined with deadlines, giving everyone a clear understanding of when something needs to be accomplished.

Another crucial point is that everyone, including clients, stakeholders, and developers, must want to achieve these goals. When you’re overwhelmed by work, it’s sometimes easy to forget that. But the fact remains: everyone on the team wants to be successful. 

A project manager must clearly understand the current situation, always stay focused on the ultimate goal, and be able to find ways to help the team succeed in reaching these objectives with the time and resources they have available. They must rise above the day-to-day chaos to see the big picture. 

If you can take this bird’s eye view, keeping in mind that everyone wants the same thing, you can focus on finding and fixing those gaps, misunderstandings, and issues effectively. That’s why flexibility is such an important and strategic skill for a program manager.

How do you keep up-to-date with evolving trends and tech innovations?

Polina: I find attending conferences to be particularly helpful. They’re good opportunities to pick up on something useful to apply within your current industry. I always bring back many fascinating ideas from these events.

While not everything at these conferences may seem immediately productive, attending can still be worthwhile. Even if only a few speakers resonate with you, their insights can be valuable. It’s a great way to meet new people and exchange experiences with those outside your company, which can give you a fresh perspective on things.

Participating in industry-specific conferences, like Food On Demand, is particularly invaluable. They help you understand the challenges encountered by people working within your industry and those running businesses. It gives you more KYC (Know Your Customer) insights, which you can later implement and use when working on your projects. 

Other common conference topics are issues like cost-effectiveness, availability, and stability, which are all interesting to listen and learn about.

For example, at this year’s NRA event (National Restaurant Association Show), various companies involved in the food service and lodging industries gathered to showcase their offerings. It was interesting for me to check out new Point of Sale (POS) solutions introduced by our client’s competitors, looking at their latest features and innovations. At this event, I saw a lot of waiter robots designed to meet the needs of the restaurant business. It turns out that these systems are not deeply integrated with POS and can function almost independently. 

By attending that show, I discovered that waiter and cleaner robots are one of the hottest trends in my industry. Now that I can see the demand, I know there’s a genuine interest and it’s obvious that these innovations might be worth exploring further.

However, remember that the goal is not to implement everything you hear about, but to test new ideas and see how they work for you.

How do you see the retail, restaurant, and hospitality industries evolving in the near future?

Polina: There’s a lot of talk about AI now; how to best apply it and how it’s likely to change the world. It’s a fact that AI is present in many solutions already, and its adoption keeps growing. AI today can be used for anything — from tracking third-party delivery issues where AI helps analyze large datasets to identify problems, to handling various smaller tasks.

Chatbots are another popular trend, not just the ones built on ChatGPT, but all sorts of other bots used for customer support to reduce the need for human operators. Then there’s voice ordering — another major trend. It’s a mix of technologies, but the key one uses AI to recognize your voice, understand what you want to order, and help process the order through POS systems.

Automation is also huge right now. The more, the better. Ideally, business owners want to see just two buttons: a “problem” button that identifies and analyzes issues and a “solution” button that fixes them automatically. That’s a joke, of course, but seriously, a lot is being done to automate problem-detection and problem-solving tasks, and we can see substantial progress in that direction.

Another trend I’ve spotted is that restaurant businesses are trying to move away from the current model, where workers are focused on performing just one specific task, whether that’s serving food or taking orders. With all these robots and kiosks handling repetitive tasks, the idea is for staff members to concentrate on ensuring a great customer experience rather than providing a single service. There is a clear shift toward hospitality here.

Is all this AI implementation a good thing for businesses in retail, restaurant, and hospitality?

Polina: I believe it is. Although businesses today both want and fear AI, particularly smaller ones. They like the idea but are intimidated by it at the same time. Still, no one rejects AI, so it’s safe to assume that it benefits businesses in many ways.

I think AI will be widely popular. Businesses across various sectors are looking into this technology with ever-growing curiosity. Naturally, concerns exist about its security and the possibility of AI taking over essential aspects. What can I say? We’ll have to wait and see. For now, as long as it makes life easier, people will keep using it.

In any industry, what’s the secret to keeping teams working well together?

Polina: It all comes down to clear communication – one of Dev.Pro’s core values. Naturally, each team is focused on its own set of tasks and has its own goals and metrics for success within specific time frames, which may not always align. 

However, it gets easier when these teams are all part of the same account. In that case, each group shares the same overall goals and tasks.

Of course, you must clearly communicate these overall goals and tasks top-down to ensure everyone is on the same page regarding priorities. When teams depend on each other, cross-team communication becomes paramount. Don’t get me wrong, you need to have a set of tools and processes to ensure your dependencies are documented and visible, and you can track progress, potential risks, and issues. What I wanted to highlight here is: don’t forget about communication. You need to cultivate it in your teams and yourself because many problems can be avoided simply by having proper communication processes in place.


At Dev.Pro, project managers like Polina play a pivotal role in bringing new innovations to our clients that help drive ultimate project success, guiding clear communication across teams and encouraging enthusiastic teamwork. To learn more about how Dev.Pro’s IT experts can transform your project management approach, reach out to us today.