Hacking Lunch at 1stdibs

Every year in December at 1stdibs the engineering organization sets aside a few days for teammates to work on Hackathon projects. Teams can be comprised of engineers and non-engineers. The only rule is the project has to have some application to 1stdibs. This year I had an idea that I was sure would be a hit. It involved something everyone in the company cared about: lunch.

First, some background. Every Wednesday, 1stdibs provides a communal lunch to the entire office. Employees get to try food from restaurants like Paradis, Dos Toros, Sweet Chick, and Parm, and have the chance to socialize with coworkers while eating together. It’s a really nice office perk that staff look forward to each week.

There are ~300 employees in our NY office, and two office managers wrangling the caterers and hungry employees. Every week, an office manager “calls lunch” by going to each section of the office and letting a few rows know they can grab lunch. After the section files through the lunch line, the next section gets called. This winds up taking close to 2 hours, which often means the last sections to be called eat lunch at 2pm. Each week the sections are randomized, so employees have no insight into when they might get called to lunch, leaving folks feeling hungry, sad, and unproductive.

But wait — why don’t employees just all line up at the same time once lunch is ready, you might be thinking? Our office layout isn’t conducive for a hundred-person queue, and having a long line snaking through our office would be disruptive to others working in our open floorplan workspaces.

Hackathon 2019

Every lunch day as I stared longingly into the kitchen, smelling the food I could not yet eat, I thought about ways to solve lunch. The Hackathon seemed like the perfect chance. I set out to form a dream team: Rob Ianna and Sam Grund, front-end engineers, and Eunie Kim, product designer. Together, we were the Lunch Bunch, and we were about to make lunch history.

Team Lunch Bunch: Rob Ianna, Eunie Kim, Sam Grund, Amy DeCicco

Research & Discovery

Our team believed we had a clear problem to solve, but we needed to speak to employees to confirm our hypothesis. We set up an informal survey and asked employees across the company to provide anonymous feedback on the lunch process. We found that employees loved Wednesday lunch, but there was friction around the process.

In an informal survey of employees, 87% of respondents said that the communal lunch is something they look forward to each week

Almost every respondent noted friction around the line process in an open-ended question. In addition, 66% of respondents reported some dissatisfaction with the lunch process.

We also wanted to better understand the office manager’s workflow. We learned via in-person interviews that managing lunch each week had some nuances. Sometimes some sections had to be called first, and each week the rotation was managed for fairness.

Page out of notebook office manager used to keep track of lunch rotation and row call each week.

Goals

With this research under our belts we set out to achieve three goals:

• Empower office managers on lunch days to efficiently manage lunch
• Give employees insight into when the’ll have lunch
• Reduce hanger and loss of productivity

Requirements

We decided to create an internal tool for employees and office managers on lunch days. The tool would allow office managers to efficiently manage the lunch queue, and let employees know what time they’d eat lunch. The team got together to brainstorm requirements for the feature. We came up with a list of features for launch.

List of requirements

Design & Engineering

With our requirements mapped out, Eunie Kim created a design. The experience would have two main views: an admin view for office managers to schedule and manage lunch, and an employee view to give insight into when lunch has started and the approximate time the employee could expect to get lunch.

Admin view (left) lets office managers upload a menu, start, pause, and fast-forward through rows of seating. Employee view (right) allows employee to choose their row, know when lunch has started, and when their row will be called for lunch.

Rob Ianna and Sam Grund took it from there and started developing. They decided to use an Express/React stack because a) we use it already in production on the 1stdibs platform and they are battle tested frameworks for building robust applications and b) we could get an app up and running in as short a time as possible, essential for a Hackathon project. The secret sauce of the app was web sockets, a technology that allows for real time communication between a server and a browser. Most commonly used in chat applications, this allowed us to provide live updates to the employee map and ETA without the user needing to refresh the page all the time.

The Product

By the end of the Hackathon, we had a functioning tool that employees and admins could use on lunch days. We got great feedback and won 2nd place out of 18 other projects.

We presented our project to the NY office and successfully used the tool to manage lunch for the first time in January. It was a resounding success. Everyone ate lunch in about an hour, office managers loved the new tool, and we were showered with thanks from across the organization. It was such a success that the office will continue to use the tool to manage lunch going forward.

After lunch has been served, it’s time for dessert.

This project was such a fun experience. You rarely get to build something up from scratch in such a short period of time that makes so many people happy. We’re already thinking about how the Lunch Bunch can top this at Hackathon 2020.

Amy DeCicco is a product manager at 1stdibs.