Case Study: Streamlining Sales
MVP - Sales CRM for Cloud Kitchens.
All mockups have been constructed for the article and don’t use real Delivery Hero internal data.
Know that feeling when you want to order Pizza but there are no Italian restaurants nearby? Dammit!
Cloud Kitchens are equipped spaces designed for food delivery that address those choice gaps. Offering an opportunity for restaurant owners to expand their food brands.
Cloud Kitchen from the Outside (Dubai).
A Sales Team with no Sales Tool
At the time I joined, our Sales Teams were using spreadsheets to track sales. But these were complex and tedious to maintain, leading to inaccurate data collection to populate internal dashboards and reports.
Additionally, the number of kitchens was rapidly growing, so tracking success became critical.
The situation was no longer sustainable.
My Role
The main objective for this project was to replace the existing spreadsheets with an internal Sales CRM that:
Adapted to the specific needs of the Cloud Kitchen business.
Made the Sales process efficient, scalable, and easier.
Ensured accurate data collection.
Offered advantages over other CRMs (like market learnings and lead generation.)
As a Senior Product Designer, my responsibilities included:
Supporting coordination across teams.
Running Discovery and Research of the current state to surface opportunities.
Driving Ideation and Design.
Conducting Usability Testing both on-site and remotely.
Collaborating with Product and Engineering for successful implementation.
Building the Right Thing
Kick-off started. With the business outcome of helping increase kitchen occupancy and track sales in mind, we find out where the Product Team could contribute to success.
We set product outcomes and leading metrics like “visibility on the overall sales status” and “number of active users”.
Mapping the partner journey and the sales process with the Data team.
Then, we met the Data Team to:
Leverage their knowledge about the journey of Restaurant Owners (Partners) and the Sales process.
Understand the initial spreadsheet they designed to track sales.
Additionally, we conducted remote interviews with the Sales Teams. We learned about their daily tasks, goals, and pain points across generating, approaching, and signing leads.
This Story Map would help us later on too, in the development hand-off.
Story Map of the Sales process. High-level goals at the top, and tasks, needs, pain points, and requirements at the lower levels.
Creating Shared Understanding
The Discovery phase gave us insights to build 2 main Personas and their key responsibilities, creating shared understanding among the Team.
Business Developer (BD)
Engaging with potential Partners through approach and negotiation.
Maintenance of the spreadsheet by updating lead stages and filling in lease and partner information.
Securing leads through successful signing.
Involving other internal teams like Onboarding, Growth, and Legal.
User Persona.
Sales Manager
Overseeing kitchen occupancy.
Prioritizing thousands of food brands through performance and market analysis.
Assigning potential leads to Business Developers for specific kitchens.
Monitoring lead sales stages and tracking history.
Analyzing the team’s performance.
User Persona.
Lead stages in the sales pipeline.
Reframing the Problem
We learned more about the spreadsheet as a tool, and observed how the Sales Team was using it.
They worked with small laptops, and were facing challenges in performing daily tasks. They felt overwhelmed with the amount of information and its complexity.
They also reported experiencing difficulties when prioritizing and managing their workload.
All this led to inaccurate data collection, time inefficiency, and frustration.
So we asked ourselves: How might we simplify each key user flow in the Cloud Kitchen sales process?
Temporary spreadsheet solution provided by the Data team to be used by the Sales Team.
We approached ideation with a strong focus on reducing information overload, and agreed on the following overall design decisions:
Use of collapsible side navigation to optimize horizontal screen real estate.
Use of expandable rows to win vertical space.
Include shared pages for both user personas.
Offer both quick and advanced filtering options.
Give complete control over lead stage updates.
Automate communication with notes and notifications.
Leveraging Machine Learning models to automate lead generation.
Wireframes in Miro — “My Leads” Page: Updating a Lead Stage and Filtering.
Final Design — “My Leads” Page: Updating a Lead Stage.
Final Design — Expanded navigation.
Final Design — Details Drawer.
Final Design — “Brand Pool” for lead targeting and assigning.
Gathering User Feedback
Some key screens were co-created with users and the whole design process was a continuous cross-functional collaboration.
But they hadn’t been yet tested as interactive task flows.
We scheduled on-site and remote testing sessions, where we demoed prototypes of key task flows and collected direct feedback from our users.
After the sessions, the Sales Team felt energized by the experience. We even noticed an increase of data entry in the spreadsheet, so we could use it to populate and speed-up the launch of the MVP.
During the on-site prototype testing with the Sales team in Dubai and Riyadh, we gathered valuable insights that helped us make the final adjustments to the product. We were able to demonstrate each key flow and solicit immediate feedback, answering any questions and addressing any concerns on the spot. The workshop was an important step in ensuring the product met the needs and expectations of the Sales team. Additionally, we conducted further remote testing to validate the changes made during the workshop.
Mapping User Stories
We ran into some difficulties when prioritizing features for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
But it turned out that we already had the solution since the beginning of the project.
The Story Map of the sales process helped us visualize key user outcomes. So we just ordered them into different levels of granularity — Epics, Tasks, and Stories, and sliced them by releases.
It also helped us identify and remove potential risks, focusing on the most impactful features first.
By prioritizing key user flows and mapping them to clear outcomes, we were able to focus our efforts on delivering an MVP with only what we believed were the most impactful features.
By using the Story Map, we were able to define impactful outcomes for the MVP. This enabled ticket creation in the Backlog and unblocked implementation.
The Impact
Happiness: CSAT above 60%
Engagement: 80% of users updated leads weekly (active users)
Task Success: Time-to-task improved by 50%
Data quality increased remarkably, leading to better visibility on the overall Sales status in our internal dashboards
Increased quality of onboarded restaurant owners
For confidentiality reasons, I have omitted the actual values for these metrics.
Direct feedback from one of the Sales Managers.
An MVP Is an Ongoing Process
User Story Mapping helped the team unblock implementation, but the scope of the MVP was still too broad.
Because of that, we experienced significant delays and ticket spillovers, which translated into frustration within the team and users.
But I believe we could have delivered more impact with a lesser effort by dividing and prioritizing user stories even further, limiting the MVP’s scope.
It’s worth mentioning that we had pressure to build the product in a couple of weeks, with limited resources and a small team.
In Ideation, it helped me focus on key user flows, but I missed having only the essentials on each screen. For the future, I might consider other approaches like the “See/Do” canvas (example by Dan Winer).
During the on-site testing sessions, I realized how much direct user feedback can influence design decisions. But it can also lead to hasty decisions if you are not able to take a step back and look for root causes.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) reports showed mixed feelings. Some of the BDs reported issues and blockers because of the early version of the MVP. But the overall feedback was positive — they felt happy to move away from spreadsheets and be able to achieve their goals faster and easier.