Glovo’s Product Principles

The product team plays a central role at a tech company. The team is responsible for implementing strategy, product discovery, defining the roadmap of milestones, specifying a product’s features and working with engineering to deliver it.

On our journey to making great products, we make a million decisions each and every day (okay, maybe not a million). Decisions that impact how the product functions, looks and feels, as well as how it scales. But these decisions aren’t made in isolation. They’re all considered and made within the larger context of the company’s future and the “big picture” of what the product should be and what it should eventually become.

To help build the product management team to make these tradeoffs, a set of product principles is needed.

What are the Product Principles?

Product Principles are a way of encoding successes, helping to guide product managers to repeat the previous behaviours that led to positive outcomes in the past and avoid the behaviours that led to mistakes. Think of them as directions, showing you how we got here and, more importantly, how to navigate the road ahead.

We drafted the very first version of our product principles upon entering our second year of operation and while hiring our first product managers. Now, five years into our journey, our business has matured and grown orders of magnitude. Now that our product team is 30+ strong, we have gone back to revise our principles: a couple of them no longer apply, a few remain very strong and relevant and only needed some minor tweaking, and we also added a couple of new ones now that our product development organisation has matured.

Below, you can see the latest version of our product principles:

Building from a Blank Canvas

The best thing to do when trying to understand an opportunity or get to the root of the problem is to ask “why”. You don’t want to copy or assume that the solution already exists. It’s important to be creative and inventive and to find organic solutions to the challenges you and your team face. It’s unique products that differentiate stand-out companies from their generic competitors in crowded marketplaces — so start with a blank canvas and innovate!

Maximise Simplicity

At Glovo, our core value proposition is taking a complex concept — like getting anything to anyone at any time — and putting it into an accessible user-friendly package for our users. Less is often more when it comes to accessibility, so favour simplicity over complexity. Deprecate the features that don’t bring value, and look to remove any unnecessary complexity from those that do — every element of the UI represents a chance to simplify our product.

Simplicity may be our overriding principle, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of those subtle surprises and touches of warmth that users have come to know and love about Glovo. We take that into everything we do and it’s part of our essence as a brand.

Take a Holistic Approach

Take into account the 360-degree impact that product changes will have on customers, couriers and partners, as well as support agents. What we do is start small so that we can ensure that we efficiently obtain the maximum value without imposing negative downstream impact on stakeholders.

Building impactful, well-rounded solutions should include close alignment and coordination between business, product, design, data and engineering, so develop strong relationships with colleagues throughout the business and welcome input from other teams. Don’t think, work or build in isolation.

Measure from Day One

Implement new features that start gathering data from the moment they’re launched. A/B test to understand the impact. Data missed is a lesson lost, and it’s difficult to make future product decisions if key data elements cannot be measured.

Instrument products to make them measurable from the outset, so you can learn from mistakes, act on insights, and be able to explain how any feature you own is behaving from a data perspective.