In 2022, the R&D team was tasked with creating an MVP product and rapidly deploying it to market to test the viability of a new market opportunity. Together, we designed, developed & shipped the me&u Pay experience within 90 days.
Background
An interesting product challenge was raised from one of our merchants, (one of the largest hospitality groups in Australia) they asked us a question — “Would it be possible to use me&u for payments only?”. This group had just acquired another hospitality group, and while they already used me&u for their ordering & payment — this new group, as well as some others within their portfolio had 2 challenges that needed to be answered before taking orders with me&u.
These venues did not have a current integration pathway with me&u, given the point-of-sale systems were unsupported, a costly endeavour for either party to treat.
Most critically, these venues were more upmarket, and the service experience these venues offered were elevated. We both felt & had past experience that mobile ordering in these venues does not yield the same usage as more casual spaces.
In addition, we also had a plethora of candidate merchants in the upmarket space that we could engage if we had a viable solution.
Development
The Research & Development squad was tasked with shipping an MVP to validate the opportunity and evaluate the cost of expansion for this project to become a fully fledged product offering.
We cracked open the sitemap for our existing app and reviewed how this new project could slot in, if anywhere.
Key takeaways:
Through our initial discovery sessions we ruled out the possibility of a merchant being able to support both our existing product and this new one in a single venue, which opened the door for faster design decisions as we didn’t have to evaluate impact on the existing product.
We’d need to still support customer session data if they used our existing product in the past.
We would need to craft a way to support multiple payments and multiple users interacting with the same bill.
With these notes, I set out and mapped the project out so that we could better visualise the scope of the project based on the requirements.
Proposed design:
Front stage, this app would appear as a standalone product, which afforded us the opportunity to avoid regression and development of new user pathways. This allowed us to focus purely on the user journey for this project, while leveraging our existing tech to handle modules like user management, authentication, payments & more. This also provided us the opportunity to release these front stage restrictions if necessary in the future.
We’d use our session tech and expand its development to support multiple clients, allowing for real-time multiplayer payments and updates to multiple clients.
