Prática IOK — Connected Equipment for Professional Kitchens

Prática is a professional kitchen equipment manufacturer. The company was investing in connected equipment, but the important question was not simply whether the machines could be online. The question was which customer problems connectivity should actually solve.

My role was to help turn that strategy into executable product and technical work. I led delivery across discovery, prioritization, planning, stakeholder communication, and hands-on engineering support.

The discovery work involved multiple groups: equipment owners, operators, managers of larger chains, internal support teams, and international distributors. Each group cared about a different part of the operational workflow.

Owners and managers needed more consistency across stores. Operators needed equipment workflows that respected real kitchen pressure. Support teams needed better context before sending technicians. These conversations shaped the first capabilities we prioritized.

The first product direction focused on centralized recipe management and usage visibility because those needs were both concrete and valuable. Later work expanded the connected-equipment experience with support-oriented signals, remote diagnostics at a product level, and maintenance-related alerts.

I coordinated work between embedded and web contributors, worked with design on user-flow validation, broke product needs into development tasks, reviewed implementation direction for the web platform, and contributed hands-on where the team needed extra capacity.

The initiative helped move recipe rollout from a slow, manual operational process into a more centralized workflow where managers could better understand whether equipment was aligned with the intended recipe version.

It also gave support teams and distributors more useful signals before field visits, improving the quality of diagnosis and making the connected-equipment platform a practical part of the product experience rather than a background technical add-on.

This case study intentionally stays at the product, leadership, and customer-problem level. It does not describe internal company data, customer names, firmware details, authentication mechanisms, network flows, private infrastructure, or critical systems architecture.

The valuable public story is the engineering judgment: using discovery to choose the right connected-equipment capabilities, coordinating work across software boundaries, and keeping technical execution grounded in customer operations.