Acorns Sr. Product Design Manager

At the beginning of 2024, I led our Acorns team, ezCater's first innovation team. The Acorns team is a dedicated innovation team focused on identifying and unlocking new business opportunities within the corporate catering industry. By analyzing emerging trends and exploring unmet customer needs, my team aimed to create breakthrough solutions that expanded market reach and provide added value for corporate clients. This team worked closely with cross-functional partners to rapidly test, iterate, and scale new ideas, from conceptualization to launch. Through a blend of strategic insights and creative problem-solving, my team positioned to shape the future of corporate catering, making it more efficient, adaptable, and accessible for businesses. Below are a series of initiatives that I led.

Meal cards

One of ezCater’s 2024 Key Results was to build the Food for Work Platform and sell it to the Business Services Vertical. To effectively penetrate that vertical, the leadership team determined one of the major verticals we needed to execute was a food expense card.

In Q1, the Acorns team was directed to deliver a MVP informed by research, meal cards user stories, and an RFP with Bank of America. I partnered with our UX Researcher to build the research plan around understanding 3 use cases:

Offer meal perks to employees that are working late
Extend meal benefits to remote employees
Offer meal perks in dense urban areas where catering or Relish are not suitable.

Instead of having a subsidized meal, employers would add a daily, weekly or monthly allowance to an employee meal card. Our market size in 2024 would be between $5M - $40M; and if scaled through 2026 would be between $28M - $56M, assuming our ability to convert larger companies.

As we were conducting research on our use cases, we had found very little interest from employers, stating that this was not a top need for their business. Employees also disapproved as they would rather use their own credit cards to earn cash back and other rewards. We had gone through two of our use cases, had a $5M contract with Stripe, our original use case was only backed by a Sales conversation with BOA and all our research was directing us to pause or stop this project.

At this point in time, it was the beginning of February. I raised this up with both my product partner and product director as a red flag. Both product partners did not agree with my approach to halt the project, stating that we had already spent a hefty amount of money and wanted to continue with the Stripe integration and project. We had continued the research and look at our final use case which was remote employees. After not being successful with this third use case, I decided to act on the research and feedback from our customers.

I met with both the VP of Product Design and Sr. UX Research Manager to discuss the results and findings of our research. This conversation escalated to the CTO and CEO, as the CEO had been very enthused about this project from the start. At the end of February, the team was instructed to pause all work on meal cards. This saved the company anywhere from $10M - $20M. The reason for pause was due to: the opportunity cost was too high and the customer research hasn’t been encouraging. It would also have taken at least 5 months to have an MVP and we would likely need several more months of investment before we could deploy to a Bank of America-sized opportunity.

This was a great learning opportunity for not just me, but my entire team.

ezEvents

In support of our Build the Food for Work Platform OKR, ezCater launched Events in order to support an additional food for work use case and increase our value to our customers. In Q3 2023, the Events team was created to handle the bespoke event planning needs of our corporate customers. For this project, I partnered with our Principal UX Researcher and Sr. Product Manager.

The goal for this Acorns projects was if ezCater should pursue events, and if we so, how are they defined and at what scale?

Should we pursue events?
Absolutely! Customer pain is acute. They are looking for a solution. They are willing to have us solve.

How do we define events?
Customers have a variety of needs for events and have defined event types as Basic, Thematic and Pinnacle. Our focus needed to be Basic and Thematic events. These events were also based on the size of participation.

How might we scale this offer?
The current pilot was not scalable as it didn't meet customer expectations. To meet our bookings goal, we needed to support with a clear offering and tech-enabled product experience.

So why scale basic and Thematic events? These are regularly occurring events, that have reproducible needs, and our customers are already using ezCater to solve their needs for these types of events. Our Pinnacle events occur infrequently, are highly customized, have a longer sales cycle, and require more specialized expertise. Event planning support comes from the venue’s event planners or established experiential event agencies. Our customers are not yet confident in our ability to execute at this level.

We decided to look at two area that ezCater would need to tap into in order to create a successful events product. These are around event planning services and vendor services. We looked into products that work with several types of vendors and not just food, including, wedding planning services, corporate retreats, and full-bartending services.

Next we interviewed a variety of companies to learn what was important to them if offered an events service. They mentioned that they could not live without these three things:

Vendor management
Product Experience
Day of coordination

Based on our customer feedback, I wrote out and designed several concepts to test with customers.

Concept 1: Build events ahead of time and within their existing schedule
Concept 2: A chatbot functionality to create events through a concierge service
Concept 3: Ability to build an event, compare vendors and packages
Concept 4: Ability to guide an orderer through a hand held process to build event
Concept 5: An easy to use event planner that is accessible to the entire team

Out of the 5 concepts, we turned concepts 2, 3, and 4 into new features within the ezCater Marketplace experience.

Guided ordering is the only feature that has been released. The other two are being worked on. For guided ordering, we saw a 10% increase in our bookings for existing customers, 7% increase with new customers and a click rate increase of 16% with a test that ran for 1 month.