
Zomato New features addition — An Agile Methodology Story. (Academic Exercise, presentation)
Zomato is a restaurant services “search and discovery” platform which in the last almost 10 years and grown to become a complete platform for food lovers and food service providers .Apart from search , its a end to end service for user reviews, ratings,exp sharing and even table booking and food ordering..with the platform becoming all encompassing based on user demands, the fast changing customer demands needs fast changing product enhancements.
Product enhancements for a hyper growth product can be really challenging , because while at one hand the pulse of the user is felt, what the user sees and experiences can be a tall order to deliver keeping in mind the journey from idea to a market ready feature..steps include to conceive, ideatate, validate , develop and finally successfully launch it to the market.
This is where environments forces the group to change their methods and agile has now become the defacto standard for what i would call a methodological “spagetti approach”.Let me explain.:)
Users demand for better services can come from any of the 50 functionality the product provides…search better, rate better, see better or navigate better. Thats because users are themselves scattered; some use phones , some use mobiles, some web and some prefer a e-handbook.While design can take care of this, the actual useability depends on the finger clicking the “call to action” button…and this is the final moment of awe.
This make or break momentary decision is better to be risk mitigated and incrementally reviewed ..but when multiple features are planned to be enhanced, incremental changes will not give a complete user experience, hence iterative and mostly agile is the method to follow.Basis Agile somethings must work in cluster…While the ideation team must think the design holistically and imagine the product in entirety and share notes with the design team…the design team in turn must make the paper prototypes to wireframes to interactive mockups and showcase the enhancements of the multi functionalities simultaneously .The idea must complete the design thinking.
With this complete thought process, development can be distributed to cohorts owning individual functionalities. Ex Search enhancements to include say “ choice of menu “search .Users search zomato for best restaurants in whilefeild, bangalore serving “dum biryani”.Ex. users book order for a birthday cake for an advanced date .such functional enhancement development must be cohorts who develop and present for acceptance and finally test it for eventual release rollout..
Agile or iterative gives a huge advantage to the developer to mitigate risk , reduce delivery cylces, develop with the end in mind and staff people most efficiently. Zomato or any hyper growth product must adopt this with its best recommended practice for maximizing user experience and bettering customer satisfaction