In business strategy, we frame a business as maximizing profit, derived from revenues - expenses. It can increase revenues with product differentiation, or decrease expenses with cost leadership. My strategy professor framed product differentiation and cost leadership as opposite ends of a spectrum of business strategy. However, I would unfold them as separate related features, with some frontier of how a business can allocate and trade off product differentiation and cost leadership.

Untethered and drawn by the fried egg and stuffed crust on their menu, I visited &pizza. Immediately their oven stood out to me. It resembled an oven you'd see in a hotel's continental breakfast. Depending on the internal cooking mechanism, you call it a conveyor oven or an impinger oven.

A conveyor oven makes cooking the pizza more efficient, which promotes cost leadership. However, I wonder if cooking the pizza actually bottlenecks the operations of a pizza shop.

Abstractly, the technology of conveyor ovens could expand the frontier and promote product differentiation with always-fresh pizza. However, the pizza came out soggy and floppy. Perhaps the &pizza artisans didn't respect the vision of the &pizza architects, though I would place the blame on the architects. To cook in the conveyor ovens, &pizza uses very thin, oblong crusts, which become soggy and floppy very quickly.

You might think I'm treating pizza as too serious business. I assure you the &pizza architects treat pizza in a business-y way: "&pizza is a fast-casual pizza brand” as their website declares, putting them in the same category as the fast-growing purveyors of “slop bowls”.