Early feedback on Sehej Sharma’s service-execution platform has come from the people who carry the problem every day. Here is what they told the company, and what the company changed because of it.
There is a particular moment Sehej Sharma has learned to wait for in every early conversation about Focus Realm. It usually comes about ninety seconds in.
“I start describing what we call the Ghost SOP, the standard that exists in the binder but not on the floor,” says the company’s co-founder and CEO. “And somewhere in the middle of the sentence, the general manager across the table starts nodding, and then they finish the sentence for me. They tell me which standard it is at their property. They tell me when it stopped being followed. That is the review that matters most to me right now. Not a star rating. A GM finishing my sentence.”
Focus Realm is still an early company. It is pre-revenue, working toward its first paying hotel customer before the end of 2026. But the feedback it has gathered from operators, advisors and early relationships has shaped the product in ways Sharma is happy to talk about in detail.
One of the most significant pieces of feedback came in July 2026, when an independent hospitality go-to-market advisor reviewed Focus Realm’s three-role architecture: a mobile Staff interface for doing the work, a desktop Manager view for oversight, and a desktop-only Author portal for writing standards. The verdict was that the architecture was on point and ready to sell.
“That was a big moment for the team,” Sharma says. “We had spent a long time arguing internally about whether three roles was too many or too few. Hearing someone who lives in hotel go-to-market say ‘this is right, go sell it’ gave us permission to stop debating and start building toward customers.”
“The review that matters most to me right now is not a star rating. It is a general manager finishing my sentence.”
SEHEJ SHARMA, CO-FOUNDER & CEO, FOCUS REALM
Across those early conversations, Sharma says the most common reaction from general managers is relief rather than excitement. “Nobody gets excited about compliance software,” he admits. “What they get is relieved. Relieved that somebody understands that their supervisor physically cannot check every room. Relieved that there might be a way to know what happened on the night shift without calling three people the next morning.”
HR and compliance leaders, he says, respond to a different part of the product. “For them, the magic word is ‘record.’ Every completed task leaves photo and supervisor evidence, and that evidence becomes an audit-ready service record. An HR director who has sat through a surprise audit understands immediately what it means to be able to open a screen and show exactly what was done, by whom, and when.”
Sharma is at his most animated describing the feedback that forced the team to change course, because he believes a company that only reports compliments is not listening.
The clearest example concerns the staff interface. Early feedback made it plain that frontline staff would not tolerate a crowded screen. “We heard it again and again: my housekeepers have thirty seconds between rooms, not three minutes,” Sharma recalls. That pushed the team to design the staff experience mobile-first at roughly 340 pixels wide and to strip it down to what a worker needs in the moment. It is also the origin of an ongoing internal initiative to reduce the number of taps it takes to complete a task.
A second example concerns integration. Early conversations revealed that property management system integration, often seen as a selling point, was frequently a reason for delay. “We would get excited talking to a GM, and then the conversation would turn to ‘we will need to check with our PMS vendor,’ and momentum would die,” Sharma says. The team made a deliberate decision not to integrate with property management systems at this stage, so a hotel can start without an IT project.
“A company that only reports compliments is not listening. The feedback that stung us is the feedback that shaped us.”
SEHEJ SHARMA, CO-FOUNDER & CEO, FOCUS REALM
A third concerns language. Operators who had been through failed software rollouts reacted badly to words like course, module and learner. “Those words told them ‘this is another training platform,’ and they had already been burned by one,” Sharma says. Focus Realm now talks about standards, operating briefs, timed tasks, evidence and readiness instead.
Not every piece of feedback has been resolved, and Sharma is open about the debates still running inside the company. Should task assignment be manual, as many properties expect today, or fully automated, so that tasks assign and alert themselves like clockwork? Should each step in a standard include a short explanation of why it matters, or does that add friction for staff? How should room and floor allocation work in a product meant to replace the WhatsApp group many hotels still use?
“These are good problems to have,” he says. “They are the questions you only get asked when people take the product seriously enough to argue with it.”
For Sharma, feedback is not a stage in the company’s development but its operating model. Every screen and every word traces back to something an operator said.
“The hospitality industry has been sold a lot of software by people who did not listen,” he says. “If Focus Realm is known for one thing in its early years, I want it to be that we listened more than anyone else in the room, and that you could see it in the product.”
About Focus Realm
Focus Realm builds software that gets standards out of the binder and into the shift. Its hospitality product, Focus Realm Hospitality, turns hotel SOPs into timed tasks that generate photo and supervisor evidence and an audit-ready service record. The company also serves universities, colleges and schools with bespoke digital learning ecosystems. It is led by Sehej Sharma (Co-Founder & CEO), Ali Electricwala (Co-Founder & COO) and Aditya Mishra (CTO). Tagline: Every shift, five-star.
Connect
Website: focusrealm.org
Sehej Sharma on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sehej-sharma-5b2151234
Focus Realm on LinkedIn: Focus Realm company page
