In 2022, me&u were looking to expand in the US market following the UK launch. The cultural expectations of an in-venue ordering platform in the US lean heavily on the service & tipping culture, in order to hit our growth targets we needed to bridge the gap between customer expectations and our current product offering.
I was the Product Design Lead focusing on growth in the US, while liaising with our internal stakeholders in the US about the merchant reception of our product we received a recurring note of feedback, “It’s just not how we do things here”. We dug deeper, and exposed a core cultural difference — customers in the US don’t pay for their orders upfront, ever. This is both equally in part due to the American tipping culture, as well as the service culture & norms in that market.
Humbly, we rescinded that we could not sustainably continue our path of pushing growth targets in this market without delivering an answer. We were also continuing to invest capital in the US in parallel, so our solution would need to be shipped within 60 days.
The result became a new payment flow for the US market that removed the requirement to pay upfront, allowing customers to pay and tip when they left, as they were typically used to.
Our market expansion strategy into the US was sales led, while that had benefits in getting us to validate the market by having practical conversations and bringing in revenue - it had the side effect of our product team planning more reactively.
So, we needed to immediately pivot, draft & validate a solution and ship it to the US to stem some of the resistance to merchant activations and reduce customer friction.
By analysing the sales pipeline and customer feedback data, we were able to validate that merchants were reluctant to start using our product until a solution was offered, and, that end customers were not satisfied with the pay-upfront solution we currently used.
I facilitated a workshop with our product & engineering leaders to identify how we could meet the requirements with a reasonable amount of development effort, prioritising a speed-to-market MVP.
Key takeaways:
Alongside the Growth team leaders, Henry Hill & Dominick Painter, we reviewed the current state of the technical layer alongside a wireframe solution, we concluded that the project would be technically feasible and achievable within the timeframe.
I used our Design teams Open Hours to brief the other designers on the project, and various design prototypes to gather feedback early and evolve the design.
To do this we would change the payment flow to remove the upfront transaction, and use our existing architecture to create a temporary session that the user would be locked to. Upon the end of their dining experiences, the user or merchant could choose to execute the charge and collect payment. This allowed for multiple orders with a single payment.
When looking beyond the MVP, there was a supportive and technical layer that would support us in scaling for the future. Enhancements for this feature over the next few months added support for customers to share tabs with friends, add menu restrictions and set a spending limit.
As we built this on a shared technical layer, we were able to share these enhancements with our Group Tabs feature — which inherited the design refresh from this project, keeping the visual implementation consistent across regions.
Since our US based internal stakeholders were involved from the beginning, they were invested in the outcome from the beginning, and understood the solution as we approached shipping, allowing for them to approach merchants and start conversations earlier.
We were careful to not add additional cognitive load to our merchants, so little additional training, and no additional management was required.
After a month of trading, we reviewed the initial metrics we reviewed at that start of the project, and reviewed what merchants and customers were saying.
Key takeaways: