Slowly, then suddenly and all at once: building a design-led culture at Delivery Hero

Sara Kalinoski at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/TUSD4pEZ_EU

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.

January 2024, and how we got there

[00:00:09] I'm going to take you back to January 2024. Suddenly and all at once, product approached UX, eager to hear our solutions. Design had built so much trust. Product was ready to implement these solutions before even seeing them. Within less than a quarter, the solutions were greenlit by our new CPO. How did our UX team get to this moment?

[00:00:36] Hey everyone, I'm Sara Kalinoski, product design director at Delivery Hero. I started my career in Minnesota, where I'm from, in digital agencies, where I worked on both product and marketing design. Then I made the move to San Francisco, continued in agencies until I moved in-house for the first time at Apple, where I focused solely on marketing design. Then I made the big move to Berlin and was briefly at Zalando before I moved to my first startup experience at Contentful, as a product designer in B2B SaaS. And then I moved into design leadership at Delivery Hero, where I've been now for nearly six years.

[00:01:14] What's really special to me about all of these experiences is how different they've been. Agencies are known for their grind, lots of long hours, high energy collaboration. Apple is one of the most mature design teams in the world. Contentful was a startup turned scale-up while I was there. We had a really scrappy design team, really high energy collaboration, and really felt deeply motivated by what we were building.

[00:01:40] And when I entered Zalando and Delivery Hero — this was 2017 for Zalando — it was quite a different time. The teams were much less mature. And so the challenge for me, especially when I joined Delivery Hero as a design manager, was how could I bring in best practices and other experiences from these other environments.

[00:02:05] This is exactly what I'm going to talk about: how do we evolve our design team and create a design-led culture? A design-led culture can show up in a lot of different ways. An experience north star, building confident IC leaders, building really strong partnerships, finding opportunities during org changes, becoming more business savvy. But for me, what it really came down to is taking ownership and following through. We saw the most change and maturity by really doubling down on these things.

The before times: 2020

[00:02:41] Now we'll go back to the before times, 2020. I think we all remember this year pretty well. At this time the delivery industry was exploding during the pandemic. For anyone who isn't familiar, Delivery Hero is a global food delivery company with marketplaces operating in 70 countries. And I'm a design leader in Pandora, which is a platform with Foodpanda in APAC, Foodora in Europe, and Yemeksepeti in Turkey.

[00:03:11] In 2020, we had a much less mature culture. Product prescribed solutions, design built them, no questions asked. Very few established processes, low design influence, the team was pulled in all different directions, really reactive decision-making across the board, lack of planning ahead, no customer centricity culture, and most concerning, no accountability for quality or debt creation.

[00:03:38] We built a lot of competing features with disconnected experiences. This is an example of one: lots of different ways to get free delivery. The root cause was that teams were just blindly shipping things, not thinking about how everything came together on one screen. We didn't understand the needs of our customers. We had high burnout and low pride.

[00:04:03] At the end of 2022, I took on a new role where I started to lead the core flow of our restaurant journey end-to-end. And at the end of the year we had a particularly bad Peakon score in my team, and so we got together and had a conversation and retrospective about our culture. The blue and yellow represent what was going well, what we felt optimistic about, and the black stickies represent what was bringing us down.

[00:04:33] If we zoom into that: designers were pulled in many different directions. They were creating really disconnected experiences, and this prevented them from feeling good about new experiences they were creating, because it was kind of just more debt on top of other debt. And there was a lack of vision across the board. We didn't know what we were building towards. At this time the design team was complaining quite a bit, and I also challenged back: what are we doing to create a design vision? What are we doing to create a more connected experience? How can we make this change?

[00:05:09] This is where the shift started to begin. I heard the team, the designers craved stability. And then we had the challenges. How can we start creating work that we're really proud of? How can design take more ownership of our process and the solutions? And how can design develop a stronger point of view? It's easy to say let's start making more innovative, visionary work, but how do we actually develop a point of view where we feel good about what we're proposing?

Elevating designers into trusted leaders

[00:05:42] This is what led to our transformation. There were a few different aspects of this. One of the first was elevating the designers into trusted leaders. Part of it is we have a really, really strong design team, and part of it was just giving people permission to color outside the lines, take ownership of an area that didn't have ownership, just go ahead and share their points of view and design solutions for certain areas, and carve out space for ideation.

[00:06:13] Another was to encourage designers to start building these connected experiences by seeking feedback from designers from other tribes. Of course, designers needed to develop data and strategy fluency, which they did, and then we started presenting solution decks with really strong rationale that made it easy to say yes to our solutions.

[00:06:35] At this time also the user research team built out a really strong culture, and all of a sudden we had product managers and others starting to quote user insights and reference user problems. And designers started to consider the vision for each feature, enabling teams to build in a scalable and strategic way.

[00:06:56] A simple example of that last one is here. We were releasing something called priority delivery, which was where people would get first in line, no stacked deliveries. And there were a lot of ways you could do that. You could continue with this toggle component. The designer also started to think about, okay, what other delivery options are there, maybe we can group them. But then we looked ahead at what else could be coming and recognized that there was going to be saver delivery, the opposite of priority, and that actually we would need to build a solution which could be scalable and allow users to easily compare between options.

[00:07:40] And so then, a year and a half later, when Saver was introduced, it was able to slot right in, really low development effort, and this design was considered successful because it was scalable. This also built a lot of trust in our team, and trust in the designers' recommendations for certain solution proposals.

Planning ahead and sharing a point of view

[00:08:01] Understanding that Saver was coming, we needed to understand how we can collect requirements to plan ahead. A few ways to do that: of course, checking with PMs in advance to understand potential opportunities, and also their approach to planning. An insight here is that not everybody had an approach to planning. One of the reasons we were working in a reactive way is some people just weren't planning ahead.

[00:08:25] We also aimed to gain access to business requests and signals. Business was also coming in with specific requests, and trying to understand, past the prescriptive request, what's really needed here, how do they think about what's showing up in the product, and then also be able to anticipate what's coming. And then plan designer capacity, protect their time. I'll speak a little bit more on this later.

[00:08:56] We also started to share our point of view for the customer experience, and at the beginning of 2023 I made this strategy deck for the restaurant end-to-end core experience. With this was a video of all of the visions for the experience that the design team had made. I wove them together, a really catchy video, to a soundtrack, less than three minutes, which made it very shareable. Our CPO shared it with the business team, he also shared it at a business summit that he spoke at, and it was able to be shared really easily on Slack. So this really cemented our point of view. All of a sudden everybody knew what we wanted to build that year. Everybody was getting excited about it and talking about how we could realize it.

[00:09:43] The list on the left is all of the features in that video. The strategy deck also had some of the principles of the experience that we wanted to change. All of it was built around data and insights. And we also considered other tribes: how can we see what's coming from other tribes and consider how to make sure that we're aligning and building a connected experience.

[00:10:09] And most importantly, I alluded to this earlier: show up and follow through consistently. Do what we say we're going to do, to build trust. Also, don't wait for permission. Build the deck, host a strategy workshop, embed our point of view at all touchpoints.

[00:10:24] One of the complaints I was hearing from my design team back when we did that retrospective was that product managers were hosting strategy meetings and they weren't including design. And then I challenged back: when you have been in those meetings, did you bring ideas, did you participate? And also, what's stopping you from hosting that same strategy workshop for your team and inviting product?

[00:10:47] And then also, embedding our point of view at all touchpoints. One insight is that not everybody likes to make decks or presentations, and that's something that I always took on, because once you build a deck you can embed your point of view. Once it's there, it's not likely to be removed.

[00:11:04] And then, of course, listening, aligning solutions to business and product goals. We wanted to make sure everything we were proposing was really well received, aligned to the business strategy, and didn't come off as overly idealistic or tone-deaf.

Finding opportunities in org transitions

[00:11:20] Also, finding opportunities and gaps, showing up with a plan during org transitions. An example of this: there was a big layoff at the end of 2023, and everybody came into the new year, it was pretty chaotic. People didn't know who was still in the teams, what we were going to ship, and it meant that all of the OKRs that had been set forth for that quarter were kind of dissolving. And so, for me, I saw this opportunity for our design team to really just set aside time to do a lot of discovery. Nobody was going to interrupt us to create OKRs. We had this time and we had some really specific projects we wanted to dig into.

[00:12:04] Of course, also seeking feedback from partners to iterate and improve, and accept some discouragement and discomfort. So the more designers started taking leadership, creating these vision decks — of course, not everything will move forward. If we're being realistic, it was probably less than a third of these visions that moved forward. And what was interesting is that some things, even two years later, we go back to the designer and say, oh hey, where's that design, I think we're ready to build it now. But over time this design team has been through so much together, and over time they built a lot of resilience and understanding about that.

[00:12:41] Also, a big part of our transformation, for me specifically, was an amazing product partner who was really open to designers stepping up. And the more we took ownership, the more they created space and embraced it.

Price clarity: the pivotal project

[00:12:57] So, back to January 2024, which was this really pivotal moment for our team. I'll share a bit more about the problem. Users perceived our product to be unaffordable. They cited confusion over deals and fees. This was a big pain point for years. But it also became a business problem, because at this time the economy wasn't doing very well, people were more sensitive about price, and if they perceived our product to be unaffordable it was a problem for us.

[00:13:24] And so, back to this deck that I shared earlier. This is one screen. We had so many of these screens with completely mixed messages. There's free delivery if you're a new user. There's an invitation to subscribe to Pro for free delivery. A free delivery with a minimum order. All of these mixed messages. One of the things that we set out for in this vision earlier in the year was that we wanted to clean up all of these tags, both the UI and the content. It was just a lot of messy deals, and at some points the text truncated. A really big mess. And so this was kind of part of where we started rooting the idea of fixing price clarity across the product.

[00:14:06] When we had this time at the beginning of 2024, where there was a lot of uncertainty and there was a gap between when OKRs started for Q1, we set out to create a price clarity deal display system. I put together a team of a few designers from different tribes and we started to tackle this. There were all of these different types of deal displays, deal types, vouchers, conditions. And we organized them into an information architecture, a clear information hierarchy. A full menu deal is more valuable than a simple dish deal. And we started to clean up everything based on this system.

[00:14:51] A few examples of what this looked like in the screens. We introduced a dedicated color for subscriptions and also a dedicated color for deals. The first screen is subscriptions in purple, deals is in the second and third. We also cleaned up the tag system. We started to completely remove deals that weren't relevant to everyone, started only surfacing the best deals, and just removed a lot of this extra communication.

[00:15:20] Along with this deal color we introduced — it sounds really simple, but because pink has been our brand color, it meant that pink was everywhere in our products, because we never guarded around it. We had pink in all of the marketing carousels, we were using it as an interaction color. So we had to really work with the design team and create a lot more logic and remove pink, to reserve it as a deal color.

[00:15:47] And then also introducing more progressive disclosure when it came to information. Rather than showing every deal, we tried to show the most relevant ones, and then as somebody became eligible for another one, we would introduce that. And then also celebrating savings, to let people know when they're really getting a good deal. And also lots of granular changes. This is a look at some of the information that we have on our vendor tiles, and needing to really clean up a lot of that and make it fit the logic of the system.

The results

[00:16:22] In summary, it was many different solutions. We built this big deck, we called it our price display bible. And the product team was asking, like, when can we see it? And we had it ready well before Q2 planning, to let everybody dig in and start to understand how we could bring this to life.

[00:16:42] Over 29 solutions were released. 13 were reprioritized into adjacent roadmaps. We generated nearly 17 million in incremental revenue. Because Delivery Hero is this portfolio company of different brands, this was really embraced by C-level, and it was something that was recommended for other brands to adopt. We also did make a stat sig change in the customer perception of affordability, so something we were able to measure before and after.

[00:17:12] And we also made a foundational change with cleaning up the communication, that for subsequent features that we enabled, we were able to build on the clean communication that we had. And the design team is recognized for this. We had both a design and research promotion after this project. This was also the first time our full org worked together across tribes, so it was a big success story from that standpoint too.

[00:17:43] What's really special about this is design was recognized at the beginning of the project for having the solution ready and introducing this to the org, but then also at the end, again, really getting a lot of recognition for how much we aligned across teams and brought this to life. And most importantly, a new CPO had joined at this time. So design established trust at a moment of transition, building a lasting impression.

Resistance and pushback

[00:18:13] Of course, nothing comes easy. There was some resistance and pushback along the way while we built this transformation. Something I wouldn't expect to be controversial was design capacity planning. Looks very innocent, a spreadsheet. Basically I worked with product managers ahead of their quarters to understand what they were considering. I asked the designers to estimate their effort, and then I went back to the PMs, asked them to prioritize, but then also shared, we can't do everything.

[00:18:47] And the reason this was controversial is because we started saying no for the first time. We started saying no to make sure that we had enough time to think about the work and not just react and make some screens, but think about it thoroughly, so we could make sure we were doing our best work. And also because designers simply couldn't do everything we were being asked to do. And this is also the way engineers work: they estimate effort, and once they're at full capacity it's understood that we can't take on any more. So after time this is something that we were able to do more smoothly.

[00:19:23] Also, design proposals were hit or miss. At times they were embraced, sometimes they were ignored completely. We had a lot of these competing UX experiences, as I mentioned, but as we started to try to improve those and align across tribes, the more we talked about certain features and tried to get alignment, we also created more friction and some escalations. And I think the root cause there is we didn't have a hero KPI, so there wasn't one way to measure the success. And so when we had competing features on the same screen, there wasn't an easy way to make a call.

[00:19:59] And then my own self-reflection is there were a lot of friction points over this transformation, and I experimented with different leadership styles to push our point of view and protect the team, and they weren't always smooth. Not every situation is smooth. And also, of course, we recognized that design needed to be flexible, so we couldn't just say no and then only work the way we wanted to. We needed to work with the current processes while also working towards improvements.

Where we are now

[00:20:29] In summary, some of the big ways we were able to make our org more mature as a design team: seize opportunities, find a way to take ownership of our time and capacity, develop a strong point of view rooted in strategy, show up consistently and follow through, and then recognize that with great power comes great responsibility. The more that we wanted to take on this design leadership role, we needed to show up consistently and remain accountable.

[00:21:02] That brings us to now. What are we doing today? The org and the industry are constantly changing, and what worked two years ago may not be effective today. The trust we build enables our partnerships to evolve together. Our consistent approach earned this trust, but we can't get lazy. We need to continue to invest and follow through. We need to keep aiming high and avoid becoming complacent.

[00:21:30] I got this far without mentioning AI. Of course, we're experimenting with collaboration improvements. But this is also where there's so much noise about how design will change with AI, and some of this is coming from design, but a lot of it is also coming from other roles. And so this is our new opportunity now to define how we're going to work with AI, how we're going to work with other teams, and how can we take ownership during this new industry and org transition. Thank you.

Q&A

[00:22:13] Host: So thank you very much. I changed. It's just going to be a big reveal. Wait, this by the way is me fancy, just in case you're wondering what it takes: an ironed shirt.

[00:22:23] Sara: Nice.

[00:22:24] Host: But it isn't about me, it's about Sara, so we'll jump into your questions. What are your most important UX KPIs, and do you have a hero KPI now?

[00:22:36] Sara: We experimented with UX KPIs in a transition period, but now we have just hero KPIs for the org, so it's GMV. We used to have a lot of different conversion steps that people would aim towards with each OKR, but now it's just GMV, and it makes it a lot easier to make the call between different features.

[00:23:00] Host: And does that cascade down? So you have your hero, and then in your area, do you have specific UX KPIs?

[00:23:06] Sara: No, everyone's working towards GMV.

[00:23:10] Host: Brilliant. Okay, it's dancing around a lot. In what cases should cross-tribe design critiques take place, and how do you conduct them?

[00:23:20] Sara: We've actually tried to introduce the cross-tribe design critique, and we didn't often have that many topics. And so it became one of those meetings that's on the calendar that people aren't always attending, because it wasn't so often that we had these friction points. A lot of work still remained in tribes.

[00:23:40] Host: Okay, so they existed, but then they fizzled out after there wasn't enough...

[00:23:45] Sara: Yeah, especially, I think we introduced it during this big project where all the tribes were working together, and then after that it became less useful.

[00:23:53] Host: Great. What happened to the features that engineering teams asked design for, but the design team didn't have time for? Were they still implemented without designs, or were more designers hired, or were they scrapped?

[00:24:07] Sara: I think when we're doing OKR planning, we're getting design estimations, but they were also getting engineering estimations. So for the most part, full teams couldn't commit. So no, we didn't have any designs built without designers. I think it was just, if anything, we tried to make more capacity for designers for certain requests, to try to match.

[00:24:35] Host: And do you have any tips? Because I guess that's just a very common question. When you're successful, you suffer from success, because everybody wants a bit of you, and there's only so much to go around. So do you have any tips or techniques to help people in a similar situation?

[00:24:51] Sara: Sure. Our design system matured quite a bit at the time, and since then, and so building with the design system is a lot faster. Also, our whole team matured. Everybody has kind of risen to high maturity, and so our lead designers and senior designers work pretty fast. So we don't find ourselves in this situation much anymore.

[00:25:16] Host: Okay, so improving the efficiency.

[00:25:18] Sara: Yep.

[00:25:22] Host: Okay, how do you manage the accessibility of the white on brand pink background color, and how can you differentiate between the brand pink color and the error state? That's a very specific question.

[00:25:38] Sara: Yeah, so we removed a lot of the pink within the UI. It's mostly just in the marketing banners and the deal color.

[00:25:47] Host: So the pink and the error, is there an error...

[00:25:50] Sara: The red error state?

[00:25:51] Host: Yeah, do people maybe misconstrue that?

[00:25:54] Sara: No, our design system team is very responsible, especially with the accessibility of colors. They're very strict about colors. We know we can't ask for more. So it's been checked for accessibility and they're distinct.

[00:26:09] Host: Excellent. How do you deal with your team's stress levels with this much responsibility, visibility, and the rise of AI?

[00:26:19] Sara: Our team impresses me so much. I say this all the time because...

[00:26:24] Host: Because they're here?

[00:26:25] Sara: No, because they're so resilient. They really are, they take so much ownership. Actually, also just at every level, they take so much ownership. And this is something where we have regular check-ins, we have regular Peakon surveys, and I feel like there isn't high stress. But of course we've talked about this now with AI. It's not moving as fast in our org, it's a lot of experimentation, but it hasn't changed our processes yet. And so I think the stress has definitely gone down compared to the environment we were in before.

[00:27:02] Host: Is there any — I know in a lot of orgs there's a learning anxiety. It's the constant feeling of, oh, I'm behind, because every month there's a brand new thing. Is there any kind of stress or anxiety around racing to keep up?

[00:27:20] Sara: In our org specifically, we've gotten a lot better, with also this new CPO, about communicating our strategy, and we really are just building towards our strategy now. So it's not changing as rapidly as it used to. So overall I feel it's improved.

[00:27:36] Host: Okay, excellent. How do you make sure customer experience doesn't go berserk when developers take end-to-end project ownership?

[00:27:46] Sara: I don't have an example of developers taking end-to-end project ownership. Yeah, I guess a lot of developers, they're always so grateful to get design support, because it just helps. So, probably offer support.

[00:28:04] Host: Okay, this being a very competitive... can we... yeah. Great presentation. What changes did you make to make sure the UI/UX inconsistency doesn't repeat in the future?

[00:28:19] Sara: That's something that we were worried about, and we thought we needed to have a lot of governance over, but actually, at the time that our design team matured dramatically, the rest of the org started maturing, because we introduced a new CPO. And so it just wasn't coming up as much, because we were also working in a much more streamlined way. So rather than having a lot of scattered opportunities that didn't necessarily even make sense to be on the same roadmap in the same quarter from the same product development team, now we were all working towards shared goals, and really well communicated shared goals that were shared in town halls and so on. So it just isn't happening very often.

[00:29:01] Host: So it's kind of a top-down with that leadership change, there was just more rigor and structure.

[00:29:06] Sara: Rigor, structure, strategy. Having a connected experience, of course, is something that design really wanted, but also the product org saw the value in that, and we started doing that also from all of the OKR planning.

[00:29:22] Host: Excellent. So, just change your CPO if you have any issues. Okay, last question. How can design teams take ownership when other roles come up with quick AI generated prototypes that are not aligned with the UX strategy?

[00:29:37] Sara: This hasn't come up much, although with quarterly planning, when we want to be able to estimate engineering effort of a simple change, sometimes PMs have made a quick mock-up in AI. But it is usually not about something we can't build, also because we've made a really big commitment to build everything with our design system. That was all over the place before, but in the last year and a half it's almost 100% adopted, and we're going to release a brand refresh later in the year. And so even if they generated something fun on their own, it has to be based on a component, and then it just wouldn't move forward.

[00:30:24] Host: Go through the process. Okay, brilliant. That actually brings us to time, so thank you very much.