Design Leadership at Rebel Foods
from Feb 2021 till date
At Rebel Foods, I had the privilege of creating a design team from the ground up, expanding it from 4 to 15 members to date. Additionally, I was responsible for establishing and optimising design processes and revolutionising the hiring process for designers.
EatSure (D2C)
I joined RebelFoods when the idea for EatSure was in the inception phase. My focus was to transform the app's UX and launch eatsure.com. We created EATSURE, a user-centered solution addressing customer need to order from multiple restaurants in a single order.
Additionally, we setup the design system, simplified the app's user-flow and finalised designs for the responsive website. My role also included providing creative direction for the EatSure offline ordering experience using Kiosks, ensuring a seamless process.
IMPACT -
Revamped app designs saw improved playstore rating from 4 to 4.3 with increase in positive customer feedback.
With the launch of EatSure Kiosk CX there was an increase in AOV (Rs +22), and increase in self ordering from 8% to >60% in offline stores.
Better discoverability of payment methods improved payments success rate from ~80 to ~84+%.
Rebel+ Suite (B2B)
At Rebel Foods, we developed Rebel+ as an enterprise solution primarily designed to operate internet kitchens within the company. We laid the foundational designs for the Rebel+ Product Suite, encompassing various platforms such as
Content, Menu and Store management application like Store creation, Product Menu creation, Product Pricing etc
Order management application with features like order status, order tracking, order history etc
Kitchen Display System for kitchen chefs to access recipes
Inventory and supply management platform to track raw materials received from suppliers, frozen foods available in the kitchen etc.
Rider app used by drivers to view customer location, mark order as delivered etc
Partner platform for seamless self-onboarding of multiple brands partners, and allowing them to have complete control of their business.
Looking ahead, our long-term vision is to market this enterprise solution as a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.
When I first started my journey at Rebel Foods, I quickly identified several areas that needed improvements :
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Talent Performance
The first step was to put together a Design Competency Framework which provide complete clarity for every role in my team
I had multiple heads to hire, and I didn’t want to set them up for failure. And so my next step was to improve the Hiring and Onboarding experience.
To bring strong emphasis on user-centric design practices I successfully built the Research capability from the ground up by advocating the importance of user research to the executive team and sponsors. -
Design Delivery
The team had all the awesome skills but needed guidance in filling the design management gaps.
Formalised 3 key processes :
1. Design Roadmap sign off with business to avoid adhocs and reduce churn
2. UX Intake checklist which helped designers get full clarity of their projects from the start
3. Formal Design UAT and signoff before go-live to avoid last minute design bugs -
Improve collaboration
To enable better collaboration and build trust I started pushing all the designers to participate in PRD review meetings, Dev sprint meetings which slowly helped them build relationships.
I strongly believe that Designers need to be good storytellers to be able to articulate their design thought process. I setup multiple forums for Designers to share their ideas and showcase their projects to larger forums to improve their storytelling skills and also gather trust from everyone on the design process.
