Inside the R&D Rotation Program: One Toaster's Journey from Customer Care to R&D Operations
Niall McMahonAt Toast, one of the values we hold closest is being hungry to build and learn — creating lasting success through boldness, experimentation, and a growth mindset. The R&D Rotation Program is one of the ways we put that value into practice: a chance for Toasters to step outside their function for a few months, take on a real role on an R&D team, and come back — or, sometimes, stay — with a broader view of how the company builds.
This post is about the first pilot of that program in our R&D Operations team — what the program is, why it exists, and what it looked like through the eyes of the person who lived it.
What the program is
The R&D Rotation Program places an experienced Toaster into a live R&D role for roughly three months. It isn't a shadowing exercise or a training track — the participant owns real work, contributes to real outcomes, and is supported the whole way by a rotation manager and their originating team.
The goals are simple:
Grow people by stretching them. Give Toasters exposure to a different discipline, a wider network, and problems they wouldn't otherwise touch.
Bring fresh eyes to R&D. Someone from a different part of the business asks different questions — and often spots things the people closest to the work have stopped noticing.
Find and build talent internally. The program is a way to discover people whose skills translate into R&D roles, and to give them a genuine runway to prove it.
For this first pilot, the R&D Product Operations team welcomed a Toaster from Customer Care for three months. What follows is his story, in his own words.
The Case Study: What I Thought a Three-Month Rotation Would Be — and What It Became
When my manager shared the R&D Operations rotation opportunity in our Customer Care channel, I applied within about thirty seconds. I'd spent years quietly drawn to the same kind of work — finding a process that takes too long and shortening it, finding a way to make people's lives easier and teaching them how. This looked like exactly that, with a title to match, even if only for three months.
What I pictured, honestly, was fairly contained: cover someone's operational work while they were on leave, keep the lights on, tidy a few things up, and hand it back in good order. A useful three months, a nice line on the CV, back to Customer Care.
That is not how it went.
What I expected: narrow. What I got: wide open
I came in thinking of the role as maintenance — a safe pair of hands for a few months. Instead, almost immediately, I was given real ownership: an internal beta program that lets restaurants and teams trial new features before general release, and a place on a project rethinking how product knowledge gets shared across the company.
The beta program alone reset my expectations. My first real task was a "spring clean" of it — working through a large backlog of trials that had built up over time, deciding with each product team what was still needed and what could be retired, and untangling the automations behind them. It sounds mundane written down, but it taught me the entire system end to end in my first fortnight, and it mattered: teams rely on that program to get real feedback before they ship, and it works best when it's tidy and trustworthy. By the end of the month I'd gone from "point me at the manual" to being the person other teams came to with questions.
I'd braced for a quiet cover role. What I found was an open door, real responsibility, and a team happy to let me walk through it.
What I didn't expect to learn (part one): what product managers actually do — and how it changed the way I work
Here's a confession that says a lot about my starting point. A couple of weeks into a project supporting the product team, I stopped and asked a colleague, more or less, "wait — how does this actually fit into how products get made here?" I'd jumped straight into the work without the surrounding context, and only realised partway through how much I'd been missing. (To her credit, she immediately filled the gap — and admitted she should have handed me that map on day one.)
That question changed how I worked for the rest of the rotation. Before, my instinct — shaped by years in Customer Care — was to jump to solving the problem in front of me. Watching how good product managers operate taught me to slow down at the start and ask a better question first: is this even the right problem, and how will we know if the solution actually worked? I began pressure-testing ideas before building anything, and looping in the people who'd have to live with a change far earlier than I used to. I went in expecting to learn some new tools. I came out approaching problems differently.
What I didn't expect to learn (part two): how to actually work with AI
I knew AI tools would be part of the role. What I didn't expect was how much they'd change the way I work, rather than just the speed of it.
I'd used AI before — for grammar, for summarising a long case. Working with more capable, hands-on AI tooling day to day was a different thing entirely, and at first it was daunting: a bit like being introduced to a brilliant new colleague and not being sure where to start the conversation.
The lesson that unlocked it came the hard way. Early on, I gave one of these tools a loose, half-formed instruction and got back exactly what I'd asked for — something vague and not very useful. I'd been treating it like a search box. Once I started defining what "good" looked like up front, giving it proper context, and reviewing its output critically rather than accepting it, the quality changed completely. You get out what you put in. You become less of a doer and more of a designer — always asking whether the result actually meets the bar.
The unexpected part was what that did to me. I found myself reviewing more, reading more, and coming away with a deeper understanding of the systems I worked in — not a shallower one. I'd half-worried that leaning on AI might dull the work. It did the opposite: it lifted me out of head-down admin and gave me the headspace to think about structure, process, and impact.
And, lest anyone think these tools solve everything: I once spent two hours trying to record a simple walkthrough video, foiled in turn by a frozen browser, a slow inbox, and — at the crucial moment — my automatic cat feeder going off on schedule. No amount of cutting-edge AI could save me from that. The machines have limits, and mine has whiskers.
What I didn't expect: how much the team would matter
The thing that surprised me most wasn't the tooling or the scope. It was the people.
I'd assumed a cover role would be fairly solitary — take the handover, keep things ticking, ask for help sparingly. Instead, the best parts of the rotation were the collaborative ones. The most rewarding project I worked on was built shoulder to shoulder with a colleague, each of us reviewing the other's work and deciding together how it should take shape — a genuine partnership, not a division of labour. And when a few things broke while I was away on leave, teammates simply stepped in and had it all running again before I was back. I didn't have to ask.
That generosity is the part I'll remember longest. You're only as good as the people around you, and I happened to land among great ones.
How it actually turned out
I went in expecting to keep a seat warm. I came out having helped build something new, having found a genuine appreciation for the product craft, having learned to work alongside AI in a way that made me better rather than lazier, and — most of all — having found a team I didn't want to leave.
So when a permanent role opened up, I applied, hoping. Being offered it was the best possible ending to the three months, and the beginning of my journey into product operations.
A few reflections I'll carry forward:
You're only as good as the people around you. Almost nothing I'm proud of from these three months was done alone. The guidance and generosity of the people I worked with is a huge part of why any of it worked.
AI changes what your work looks like, not whether you're needed. Used well, it pulls you up — out of the busywork and into the thinking. I review more and rubber-stamp less, and I learned more in three months than I expected to.
Say yes before you feel ready. I jumped into work I didn't fully understand and figured it out as I went, with a lot of help. That leap turned a three-month rotation into a career move.
Why it matters
The pilot did exactly what a rotation program should. It gave one Toaster a genuine stretch, a broader network, and a new direction — and it gave R&D Operations a fresh perspective and, ultimately, a new full-time team member. Part of what this first run showed is that Customer Care, and teams like it across Toast, are full of people with the skills and drive to take on new challenges when they're given the chance.
We're just getting started — and we can't wait to see what the next rotation brings.