Agile in Action: An example from Food Tech space.
Developing a new product or a new new feature in an existing product is quite tedious as it can be tricky, unclear and quite frustrating. Once research is done in identifying the user requirements, there is a structure process to help us complete the development and deliver the feature or product. This process is Agile methodology. This methodology enables Product manager’s to clearly draw structured path and monitor it all along till the release.
Typical product development involves the following steps:
a. Ideation
b. Design
c. Implementation
d. Testing
e. Deployment.
There are several ways to develop software, two of the most prominent and commonly adopted methods are Waterfall and Agile.
The Waterfall methodology incorporates sequential product development processes.
The Agile methodology incorporates both incremental and iterative product development processes.

The agile software development emphasizes on four core values.
- Individual and team interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Incremental software development entails delivering finished components of the whole in parts at the end of agreed deadlines i.e. Sprints. This allows companies to gather feedback at constant intervals and iterate accordingly. It allows you to stagger the release of features which are of utmost value to customers.
Developers start off with a simplistic project design, and then begin to work on small modules and deliverables. The work on these modules is done in weekly or monthly sprints, and at the end of each sprint, project priorities are evaluated and tests are run. This way the target for every sprint is on a fixed deliverable which becomes the basis for the subsequent sprints.
Agile Scrum is a more commonly followed practice these days. It is a process framework for agile development. A Scrum process is distinguished from other agile processes by specific concepts and practices, divided into the three categories of Roles, Artifacts, and Sprints.
Scrum significantly increases productivity and reduces time to benefits relative to classic waterfall model.
Now, considering as a Product manager at Zomato, Let’s make use of the Incremental and Iterative methodology of the Agile Process for developing some of the features such as rate/review restaurant, filters for search, and online ordering.
Rating a restaurant
We generally provide ratings or reviews as a sense of providing feedback to the restaurants, which enable restaurants to improve their customer experience and address issues reported by customers.
Probable iterations for the ratings feature could be:
a. Like vs dislike / Good vs Bad: This is used when are rating based on a binary scale (0 or 1). This method is helpful in identifying if the performance is good during the initial phases. For subsequent versions we could introduce Linear scale.
b. Linear scale of 1 to 5: This is commonly used when we request user to consider rating on a specific scale instead of binary. This is more commonly used in most web sites. This also allows user to add review in a text.
c. Tabular form with measure against different parameters: This tabular enables restaurants to pinpoint area that needs major improvement instead of relying on the comments provided by user.
Later on, we’d integrate social media, which will enable the restaurants to listen to user conversations about their restaurants online on social media platforms. This would complete development of rating and review feature.
Search
Zomato is a huge platform for all restaurants. If a user would like to search for specific restaurants it is pertinent for the app to provide ability to search and filter results.
Preliminary development deliverable in the initial sprints would be to provide a search button to enable users to search for restaurants. In the next sprint as an incremental version, we can create couple of filters where we can enable user to filter based on cuisine, location, price etc. In the Subsequent sprints, we can add more filters which will filter restaurants based on popularity, home delivery option, distance etc.
This way based on the user researches and usability tests, we can decide what parameters are used by the customers.
Online Ordering
So far Zomato has been a platform for searching and reviewing restaurants. Majority of the users shift on to other platforms like Swiggy or FoodPanda to order food. This would be an altogether new functionality to develop on Zomato. Once we gather all the user artifacts from user research and have developed wire frames and prototypes, we go into development of this feature.
There are 2 sides to this feature, the seller side and buyer side i.e. end user side and the restaurant side.
a. We need to build functionality to allow user to add to cart.
b. Ability to view items in the cart. Add or edit or delete them.
c. Ability to add delivery address.
d. Add payment gateways (initially plan of a couple of options like Visa and Master Card. In the later iterations plan for Cash on delivery and other payment options).
d. Ability to notify user on the delivery time etc. Ability to track order.
e. To gather feedback on the process, provide a feedback option to gather reviews on the delivery process.
By being agile it would give Zomato the flexibility to iterate based on user feedback for every feature. End of every sprint their is a working deliverable, which can be tested and feedback can be gathered from users and can be incremented and iterated in further cycles. This allows Zomato to always be in touch with their users and understand their needs and wants.