Lessons In Shipping Fast Remotely With Cross-Functional Stakeholders

Saumya Dubey at UXDX Community: Bengaluru. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS_DHRYHAbE

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Shipping Swiggy Instamart from inception to launch in 60 days

[00:00:01] Hey guys, this is Saumya. I'm a principal product manager at Swiggy. And today we are here to talk about how do you ship products fast with a remote work setup? This is the story of us launching Swiggy Instamart from inception to launch in 60 days.

[00:00:16] This is how your usual product building cycle looks like. There is product ideation, there is problem identification, solution ideation, design, execution, GTM readiness and launch. And throughout this process, you are in parallel constantly prioritizing, collaborating with your peers and aligning stakeholders.

[00:00:36] But what changes in the remote setup is, there's a lack of instant connect. Collaborative ideation takes a hit. There is loneliness that can set in. And as a result, people have reduced motivation, projects start moving slower. Silos often get created, and as a result of which alignments can become 10x harder.

[00:00:56] So then how did we not only ship a great product from inception to launch in 60 days, but had consumers giving raving reviews? And how often do you see people going woohoo about a grocery delivery offering?

Why we were building Instamart

[00:01:10] Before we get into how did we go about it, I just want to take a few minutes to talk about why were we building Instamart. Swiggy already had a grocery offering where customers could shop from local stores in their city. But consumers were finding the experience not so reliable. Sometimes all the needed items weren't available in one store. There were frequent out of stocks.

[00:01:36] To solve these consumer problems, we started piloting a deeper integration model with entrepreneurs that own dark stores. And we saw increased consumer satisfaction with improvement in our availability and fulfillment rates. And this was all pre-COVID. But when the pandemic hit, it changed things a lot for us. So we paused all of this for a bit. And sometime in May, we got back thinking that, hey, our pilots were already being successful. Now we need to launch it in a big way for our consumers.

[00:02:09] So now, what were we launching? We knew that we were launching an instant delivery offering, which offered 30 to 45 minute deliveries of groceries, catered to urgent and midweek purchases for consumers. We wanted it to be a place for new age urban consumers to get their daily needs. And we wanted it to be something which was a mix of a 7-Eleven of US and the next door Kirana shop. So in short, we were trying to launch the Indian version of convenience grocery. But as you can see, these are all very broad strokes and our canvas was still pretty blank. But this is how we got started with our project.

Three phases, and defining constraints

[00:02:48] Now getting into the how part of how did we really ship this fast. We did the project in about three phases. And I'm going to walk you through them by giving examples of how they shaped our product building journey. We are going to start by defining constraints, setting anchors, and then finally empowering your team and tracking the project as it moves forward. And through all these phases, you will need to do a ton of alignments.

[00:03:14] Defining constraints. While we all secretly wish for infinite time and resources on our projects, we do know that never happens. And this is why it is so important that you get everyone on the core team to empathize and understand these constraints. This not only enables your team to think creatively around the constraint, but also saves everyone from disappointments later on.

[00:03:40] So for us, the constraints looked something like this. There was constraint on the timeline and the resources we had. There are past consumer habits and memories: users who had previously experienced Swiggy's grocery offering and were not so happy about it. And there were ecosystem challenges. There were other online grocery players who had grown bigger during the lockdown. And we had a need to differentiate for consumers to give us a try.

Setting anchors: consumer beliefs and principles

[00:04:05] The second phase is of setting anchors. Through this exercise, we are making our problem definition sharper and then drawing out the broad strokes for the solutions. It's a common practice as part of the problem definition phase for you to write down your objectives and target metrics. But we took the extra step here and made it sharper by writing down how we want our consumers to feel about our product, and therefore what should be our key principles that will guide our solutions.

[00:04:41] So we wrote down the consumer beliefs. We talked about the product and design principles. And from these, we derived our key decisions. I know it can all sound like a lot of jargon. But to help you understand how this shaped our product building journey, I'm going to give you a few examples of Instamart.

[00:04:58] We started by writing the consumer beliefs. Who is your consumer? For us, these were Swiggy loyalists who order grocery from Swiggy once or twice a month and usually did that for midweek purchases or really urgent needs. We wrote down the accepted customer belief that these consumers had today. As of today, these customers felt that they were shopping here primarily for unplanned needs from nearby stores, when they needed it in a couple of hours but couldn't go out. Customers also said that I don't use the service offering often, as at times all the items that I need aren't available in one store.

[00:05:35] Going from this, we wanted to transform the customer belief to be: I tried this new grocery offering on Swiggy. I found all the items I needed. I now can get all my weekly and urgent everyday needs delivered instantly. So this is what we want our consumers to say. And this started shaping the principles and the key decisions that we had for our product.

[00:06:02] We wanted consumers to be aware that this is a new revamped grocery offering and it is different from what they had previously experienced. We aligned that fast and reliable was going to be our right to win. And if this was our core principle, the decisions we needed to take were decisions like a high percentage of deliveries happening under 30 minutes. We needed to make sure that consumers understood that this was a new offering. We had a huge upfront onboarding. And we had many more decisions coming up even before we got into the design process.

Two tips: do it together, and run silent meetings

[00:06:51] Before we move into the next phase, I had two tips. The first one, do this together. Doing this together not only enables contribution from all the members of the team, but it will also give the feeling of, hey, this is our project, and therefore dampens the feeling of loneliness that is very common with a remote setup.

[00:07:10] The second tip I had was do more silent meetings. In a virtual meeting setup, it is so easy to get distracted, especially in those moments when someone goes off the agenda. Silent meetings help you solve that. Set about 60% of the time for everyone to first note down their thoughts in a common doc, or read through the doc that you already have. And then give the group the time to react to each other's points. This will help you have much more deep and meaningful conversations and move faster on your decisions.

Aligning stakeholders with a PR FAQ

[00:07:45] The next phase is of aligning stakeholders on key decisions. It is super important for you to align your stakeholders before getting into the phase of execution, as it helps you avoid disaster moments where you end up redoing a lot of stuff at a later stage of product development, because you realize that some senior executive or someone very important in the team is not aligned with the way you thought about something.

[00:08:09] How we went about doing this alignment process was through a PR FAQ document. Writing PR FAQs is something that you might be familiar with. This is something that Amazon follows. So we wrote down a PR and 25 page GTM and FAQ document even before we started designing. This made sure that all the stakeholders and the people working in the core team were very clear on what our principles were, what were the decisions that we were taking, and how it is going to impact and shape our product going forward.

[00:08:42] Another tip before we get into the next phase. Do smaller group alignments first. Oftentimes even when you think that you have all the things figured out, it's very easy for you to get into a big meeting with a lot of senior execs and the meeting does not go well. Having these smaller alignment meetings where you can get their feedback early on will ensure that your final meeting, where you are kicking off the project, goes super green.

Empowering the team and tracking the project

[00:09:11] The next phase is of empowering and tracking your project. Since we had done such a great job at defining what our key principles and decisions were, now we could decentralize the decision making process going forward. The anchors were set, and everyone in the team knew that they could take decisions and just drop an FYI note for everyone else to be in the loop. This also meant that we could do much harder prioritization. We ruthlessly cut down features that were not solving for our key desired customer beliefs and principles.

[00:09:44] As part of the tracking process, we established high accountability by setting up rhythms for weekly updates to leadership, and also doing twice a week demos, so that everyone had a check in of what was happening, what was expected next, and when are we launching and how close are we to launch. And then we started designing, iterating multiple times over what we wanted to launch, getting our engineers supercharged to ship this amazing product. And this is how we built Instamart in 60 days.

[00:10:16] Before we wrap up, one last tip. Don't forget the pixie dust. It is often the small elements of delight that gets your users smiling. It's very easy to miss the small elements of delight when you're running on a tight deadline. But these are the things that are going to get your users smiling, so don't miss them.

[00:10:38] To wrap up, spend about 30% of your time defining your constraints and anchors. And make everyone in your team feel a part of the process. They should feel like you are one big family with the same set of values. And that is how you can ship products super fast even in a remote setup.