The Future Of Last-Mile Delivery: Self-driving Cars, Virtual Kitchens, AI | Chief Product Officer at JustEat Takeaway, Jessica Hall | E239

In this episode of #TheProductPodcast we chat with Jessica Hall, Chief Product Officer at Just Eat Takeaway. Jessica shares her journey in the food delivery industry, detailing her role in transforming Just Eat Takeaway into a global leader that serves over 81 million customers across 19 countries. She discusses the complexities of re-platforming a product, integrating diverse team cultures after multiple acquisitions, and simplifying the user experience of a multi-feature platform.

In this episode, Jessica dives into her strategic framework for product expansion, focusing on how she prioritizes new markets, users, and use cases. She also addresses the future of food delivery, highlighting trends such as AI, self-driving cars, and virtual kitchens. Jessica emphasizes the importance of maintaining a customer-centric approach while navigating the challenges of a rapidly evolving industry.

Key Takeaways👇:
- Customer-Centric Innovation: Jessica highlights that understanding customer needs is vital for driving successful product development. Just Eat Takeaway's expansion into non-food items reflects their commitment to convenience.
- Culture Integration Post-Acquisition: She shares insights on creating a unified culture within a diverse workforce, emphasizing that engagement and communication are crucial for overcoming challenges.
- Simplicity Before Automation: Jessica advocates for simplifying processes before automating them, ensuring that businesses can operate more efficiently and effectively while reducing costs.

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Credits:

Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Jessica Hall

Transcript

Carlos (01:55)
Welcome to the show, Jessica.

Jess Hall (01:58)
I thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here with you.

Carlos (02:02)
It's always great to have you. You've been such a supporter of the product school community as a speaker at product con London at least twice, right?

Jess Hall (02:12)
Yes, and you know what, it's a great community and great stuff going on with Product School, which is why I keep coming back time and time again and why I love interacting with the community because as we grow this function, this profession, as we change the industry, it's great to kind of source inspiration from this community and be part of it.

Carlos (02:34)
I know you're also an active public speaker. I saw you gave talks at TEDx and in other places. So where does that interest and also knowledge come from in order to put yourself in those positions? Because I can imagine that wasn't part of the original job description as a CPO.

Jess Hall (02:53)
Were you going to have to change that? You're gonna have to ask me that question again, Carls, because the TEDx Jess haul is a different Jess haul, it's not me. I've not done TEDx, but I've done other things. So you'll have to edit that one. You asked me again? Yes.

Carlos (03:03)
Okay, sorry. So I asked the question. Yeah, yeah, no worries. And I know you've also participated as a speaker in many other places. So I'm curious to know where does that passion come from? Because I can imagine that wasn't part of your original job description as a chief product officer.

Jess Hall (03:26)
It definitely wasn't. And it's a bit of an unanticipated part of the job, if I'm honest, both internally and in the public arena. But the reason I do it and the reason I'm out there, well, there's a few reasons, but one of the most important things to me is driving change in the tech industry. And as a junior in my career, I just didn't see people like me, standing on stages, didn't see people like me leading big teams or doing roles like this. And I had those moments in my career where, you I actually did nearly leave the tech industry because I wasn't sure that I could succeed without having to really change who I was and change my sense of self. And so I think that as a small part of changing that, standing up and telling people that I have achieved success on my own terms. And that you can achieve success on your own terms and that each and every one of us, the different things we bring, we can still achieve our career ambitions. So I like to be out there and be that person that might provide some inspiration or at least a role model to some of the people coming into the industry.

And then like on a simple note, I'm super proud of my team and the work they do. And I love being able to tell people about that. I love being able to go out there and talk about the innovation and the change and the exciting things that we get to work on. Because quite honestly, I feel like I have one of the best jobs in the world and I'm so lucky to be able to do it.

Carlos (05:08)
Well, let's talk about that job. So you are the Chief Product Officer at Just It Takeaway. Tell me also a little bit more about the company, because I know it's a long story and there's been multiple acquisitions that are part of your current company now.

Jess Hall (05:24)
So today we're a global business of 19 markets. We currently have about 84 million customers. We have over 730 restaurant and retail partners who are on our platform. We have thousands of couriers and customer service associates. And we are bringing convenience to our customers every single day. That's what we're about. So we're a global meal delivery business, but we've expanded into all sorts of other things. So we started with restaurant food and getting your takeaway quickly. Now you can get groceries and a whole host of non -food items like electricals, things for the home, pet food, all sorts of things, because we are trying to be at the heart of convenience for our customers, being able to get the things that they really need in minutes. And that's what we've been developing.
But you're right, we do have a long history and that's formed part of the work we've been doing in the last few years as well. we have formed three mergers and acquisitions. So one of the challenges in this role and one of the challenges for us as a business is that's meant we've had multiple different technology stacks and different tech platforms to work with. So when we have that great creative innovation.
We've had to do it multiple times on each tech stack in order to release that feature to all of our customers. And after the growth of the pandemic, when I'm sure many people listening and watching might have either ordered more or ordered for the first time from businesses like ours, after all of that growth, we're now focusing on consolidating. And in the last year, we've undertaken a massive transformation program.
And we are very close now to rolling out one customer app to all of our markets. So that's the first part of a journey of consolidation of seven different platforms down to one target platform. And we have still got quite a lot of work to do on the back end, but we're really making progress. And that's allowing our time to market to increase. It's allowing us to get features out to our customers much more quickly, because we don't have to develop them most in multiple places. And I think, you know, also just reducing that maintenance time that, you know, the time we have to spend on bugs and maintaining the platform when there's one to maintain that can reduce. I think we all would agree that the innovation and the exciting releases is where we actually want to be working. So it's exciting for all of us.

Carlos (08:10)
It is exciting that word replatforming is also very sexy and scary for others, right? Because I can imagine it's a lot of work that goes behind the scenes. I was just geeking out to learn more about the history of your company. And I saw that there were two companies, one that started in the Netherlands just in 2000. And it went public in 2016. then, so that was Takeaway. And then Just Eat started in 2001 in Denmark and went public in London stock change in 2014. So those two companies merged in 2020 under the name of JustItTakeaway .com and continue being listed on the London Stock Exchange. And then you kept going and then in 2021 acquired GrabHub, which is huge here in the US and a few other acquisitions. So when you mentioned 19 markets, so many different companies, like how do you go about trying to unify that under one single platform?

Jess Hall (08:55)
Yes. It's a very difficult task. And you're right, it's not, it's not the sexy work that everyone wants to do. But it's so important. And it's such a big unlocker for the business and for what we want to achieve that, you know, we've created a huge focus on, on getting this done. So, and I would say that almost the technical elements of doing that migration are the least challenging parts because actually it's about winning hearts and minds at the start and being very clear about what you're setting out to achieve, why it's important, making sure that I put my backing behind that task so that everyone understands that I want it to happen, that it's important and that there is support across the business to get this done. Because it does also mean trade -offs. When you're doing that kind of work, you can't do as much feature development. That's the reality. You have a finite capacity and you have to make choices about where you put that time. And if you index more towards the consolidation, has implications. And so that choice and the culture that you create around it's really important. We also decided as a leadership team to set a really stretching goal around what we could achieve in the first hundred days, just to see how far we could go and just see what can we get off? You know, can we achieve something in that time? Can we get a win under our belt that tells us something more about the next thing? So instead of making a plan that's two years long, and this is all the steps and all of that kind of stuff, it was what can we do in the first hundred days? And after that, it was like, well, okay, now we've learned something and we've got somewhere. We know what market we're going to go to, let's put another stretching deadline in and see what can we achieve by that date. Now, there were some commercial things that we had to take into account and all of that kind of stuff, as with any business. And that drove some of the timelines. But we tried to create an environment where with the right focus culture, our teams could tell us how to get it done. And what we also did as part of that was really take a very, like take thin slices at a time. So we have not tried to migrate and merge the entire platform in one go.

We've started with the customer facing elements and getting every customer into one experience. The back office pieces are still going on, you know, and some of those will be going on for a bit longer still. But by breaking it into pieces, we've been able to achieve something. We've been able to feel like we've got a win, which is so important because no one wants to be working on something for years with no wins, only at the end getting to celebrate. All the way along the way. And that's also given us flexibility in the roadmap, the overall roadmap, because we've been able to break up the pieces into thin slices and intersperse that with feature development and other things that we want to do to move the platform forward. So we just can't stand still while we do this work. It's very complex to manage, but with everything, people are at the heart of what we do, you know, and an engaged workforce is the key. So that 100 days piece and giving everyone a bit of a voice was really important to me.

Carlos (12:33)
I like that concept of the quick wins and making sure that people are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, especially if it's going to be a long ride. I also want to double down on what you mentioned about people and culture. can imagine for such a global team who been working on different products, so maybe some of them came through an acquisition, how do you go about integrating that culture as well?

Jess Hall (12:43)
Yeah. I'd be honest with you, that has been very difficult. And it's been made difficult by a few things. These mergers, they happened during the pandemic. we all, you know, we were all around during the pandemic, even when the worst of it was over, travel was very difficult. Remote working, things like that meant that, you know, for quite a long time, our colleagues in different countries, different locations, couldn't meet each other face to face. So lots of the interaction, despite our best efforts, was fairly transactional. So it's taken time to really like grow more, you know, less meeting culture and more connection culture, more collaboration culture. And I think the desire was always there. I think everyone wanted that, but it was very difficult to know how to go about it in a post COVID world.
When previously, you know, we would have probably had team away days, we would have spent time together, we would have done those types of activities, bringing different groups of people together, and we couldn't do that. So we really had to try a few different approaches, and not all of them were successful. And I think that's also like, that's a good lesson for product management. It's a good lesson for leadership. You have to try things and not all of them work, despite how positive and enthusiastic you might be about it at the start. So, you know, we, we merged our teams and we started to try and create this culture by creating teams that owned legacy tech on both sides. So we didn't have a takeaway team and a just each team. We had one global team. That was our first step. That was a big piece of work that we did in 2021. And then from there, we've tried to develop a culture, but we had very different business cultures, very, very different and geographical cultures. You know, we're talking about UK, Netherlands, Canada, Germany, being some of the main areas where my team are located, all very different cultures geographically. So we tried a number of different ways to help people connect and we also released some principles about how we expected people to behave. And some of them have been adopted really well and some of them we had to revisit after a time because we were feeling that things weren't quite landing the way we wanted them to or that we had engagement challenges that we were seeing in our employee surveys. What's that led to? Earlier this year we spent a good amount of time and looking at feedback from our latest employee survey and also the anecdotal stuff about how easy it was to get your job done and how it was working across teams. And we've just done a restructure of our product organization. And in that restructure, we've tried to co -locate people where we can so that they can get a bit more in -person time.
We've also tried to make more end -to -end ownership and remove some of the dependencies and narrow focus that we'd started to see coming out of some of those teams so that our colleagues feel like they have end -to -end ownership to really solve a problem. And we know in product that that is exactly how we should be structured, but sometimes your organization grows up around you and little bits and pieces happen, and then all of a sudden you realize you've got a bit of a challenge with that. we've been really working on that this year.
We spent a long time thinking about it and making sure we got it right. And we launched that in June this year and we're already seeing really positive change and positive feedback from our teams. But the last point I'd say here about culture is it's just never finished. It's a constantly evolving thing that needs work. And it's the most important thing we can put our time into.

Carlos (17:06)
Yeah, I took the takeaway from from what I'm hearing for me. It's two things. One is, is that the word culture the same way as the word transformation or re platforming never really ends and finding ways to be constantly on the lookout for the next iteration is, is important. And, and also it sounded similar to the concept of tech debt, like how it seems like you're not simplifying the platform. The culture, people culture side also sometimes pay attention to how we can simplify and unify and like go back to the basics even though obviously you are operating at a massive scale.

Jess Hall (17:41)
Yes, that's really at the heart of it and you've touched on something fantastic, Carlos, because one of our principles is keep it simple. in a business of our size, there can be, you know, lots of reasons not to do something or lots of edge cases that you can come across. And you can get sidetracked into trying to solve every single one of those rather than getting the value, getting something out there, learning and iterating on it. And so that keep it simple messages is critical. And in the world of kind of, of, of automation, of machine learning, of AI that we're stepping into, I see lots of people talking about productivity savings as a result of that.
I'm a really firm believer that you have to do simplification before automation. There's no point in automating a process that is not a good process or you don't need to automate 20 steps if you can get it done in three. And I guarantee that if you can simplify it, you will get your automation done much more quickly. And that's a massive cost saving driver for so many businesses, providing them the capital to invest in other things.

Carlos (18:57)
So I have a question for you around product strategy. It seems like you have a few big initiatives around re -platforming the product. At the same time, if I think about strategy as a portfolio of bets where you are allocating bets to something that is more long -term versus short -term, how do you go about carving out time for continuous innovation and also staying up to date with AI and other things that are important for you?

Jess Hall (19:28)
Well, this is just part of the job as far as I'm concerned. So when I talk to my teams, I talk about product management in three main areas. The first area is making the products you have as good as you can. So that means the tweaks and the small changes that get you additional juice, let's say, from your product. Maybe you can make some small changes which actually result in a big conversion improvement. We've had some examples in the last year where we've made some small changes to the menu that have resulted in great order growth. those kind of tweaks, that's, know, optimize your product to the max. The second section for me is all about either new products or taking your product further. So it's the bigger new feature development or starting a new product and seeing a gap and solving that problem. And then the third part is the horizon scanning, the strategy, the future, what's going on, know, research, all of that side of things. Because I think that you do see blending across all three, but actually if we're not looking ahead, if we're not challenging the creativity, innovation, and we're not bringing that to the table, then I don't think we're really driving the value that product should be driving. Because, you know, we are sitting at that intersection between tech and the business and the customer. And that tech part is about bringing, you know, in this case, AI or whatever it is to the to the table to solve problems, that customer piece is about understanding where trends are going. For example, we see massive adoption of electric vehicles. We know that people are not filling in gas stations for a few minutes. They're having to sit at charges for a long time. They're having to charge on journeys, et cetera. So one of the things we've been doing is working with car manufacturers. And we have launched with Mercedes in Europe, in -car ordering using the in -car entertainment, because we know customers are going to stop to fuel. So why not eat a pizza while you charge your car. you know, so you got to bring that and then the business side, you know, that's the optimizing like understand what is driving the business be commercial. And that's something which sometimes gets forgotten. But when you bring all of that together, if you're not looking at the future, I just I don't think you can be effective in those other areas.

Carlos (22:08)
Yeah, I don't think the future will happen. Like even if it's a small allocation of time for that futuristic bet, there has to be some of it. Otherwise, there will always be something else in the short term that will require your attention.

Jess Hall (22:22)
100 % and that's the challenge of being a product manager I think because you know actually it can be a very difficult job at times because you can feel like you're making nobody happy even though you're working incredibly hard because you're trying to do all of those things but with a finite capacity and you have to be pretty tough about saying you know what this future work laying the foundation and this future piece has to happen so I've got to conserve some space in my roadmap for that, whilst also delivering the things that are needed here and now and that, you know, the business is crying out for or that, that keep us, you know, in step with competitors, hopefully stepping beyond them. But, you know, they'll always be market forces. And I do think that's one of the hardest things about being a product manager.

Carlos (23:08)
So I'm going to use your analogy of the three sections. So we covered the first one in a way, like what we do now to make our current product better. Fine. I want to talk about sections two and three. Three being the future. So let's start with two, which would be around product expansion. How are you going about expanding your product from the food delivery into now other types of delivery? I heard you talk about groceries and even pharmacy.

Jess Hall (23:12)
Yeah, and that's a great example. where we saw, you know, customers wanted prepared meals, restaurant food at home. We started also to think about, you know, what else do customers want quickly now that attitudes have changed and what could we do with the technology that we have to service those needs? And grocery was one easy step. It's still food, and there's still roughly a menu. So it was more of a kind of, it's an add on. Now over time we've made it better because typically groceries tend to be bigger and heavier than restaurant meals. And if you've got to put that item in your bag and cycle to somebody's house, like you can't either fit very bulky things or very heavy things in. So we've had to iterate on that, but that's where that came from. And now we're seeing "what else is it that customers want? When do they have an immediate need?" Some of that's around, I've run out of something, so I need it. They may make an appearance, I have two cats, I might run out of cat food and I need it quickly, so I'm going to place an order, we just need takeaway because I know I'll get that cat food in half an hour and it's all going to be fine. But also, sometimes it's about luxury. I'm making an expensive purchase in Germany, you can buy an iPad or a MacBook on our platform. It's expensive luxury product to buy. I want it quickly. I don't want to have to wait two days for it to get shipped to me. I don't even want to wait till tomorrow. I've made the decision. I want it now. It's the next best thing to being in the shop itself. So there are a few different use cases and we're looking at all of those, but these are all what I'd say add -ons to the core product that we then make better. So this is, that's why I would put those in the expansion piece. you know, and there are other things that we also do that are, you know, maybe a bit less visible to the average customer, you know, around business to business, catering and other things. And those are also ways to expand the product to a different user base, but whilst utilizing, you know, a good chunk of the knowledge or technology that we already have.

Carlos (26:03)
So what's your rationale behind making that type of decision? Because I can imagine you have so many different good options. You can go into different markets, you can go deeper into existing markets, you mentioned B2B. How do you actually prioritize?

Jess Hall (26:21)
Great question. Always on value. That's where we start. And that's something we've been iterating. So we actually run what we call a continuous planning process. And that means every month we look at what we've got in flight, what we plan to do, and what's even coming later in the year. And we update our progress. We assess whether we're making the right decision still. Is it still expected to achieve the same value? Have we learned something new? Should we pivot? Every month we do that.
And we have a real culture of transparency. So we do that in my team and we publish that to the entire of the business. So everyone in the business can see what we've been doing and what we're going to do. We have a prioritization framework. We start with value and we look at it in a couple of different ways. You know, I'm sure that the people watching will be familiar with all of these things, but you sometimes it's about risk avoidance.
Sometimes it's about revenue, know, sometimes it's about, you know, growth of orders, different things. And we, we, we, we go through all of those and we look at long -term value and short -term value. And then once we figured out the things that we think are really going to move the needle for the business, we do a bit of a planning process that says, okay, well, what can we actually get done with the team? Because if all of this work falls in one team, they just can't, they can't, they can't do all of that.
So we'll pick and choose and balance it. I call it kind of Tetris at best point, because we're trying to figure out how we get the maximum value. The other thing that we do internally, we call it inner sourcing. I'm sure many people will be familiar with it. But in order to speed things up, we also allow our teams to contribute to code bases in other areas so that we're not always waiting. That removes a little bit of the Tetris requirements, because we can do small pieces of work to move our main programs along. But the other thing I would say is that once we've gone through that, tend to we publish, I've just published it for 2025. I can't tell you what's on it. And we publish a list of really the top 10 things that we're going to do next year, and the things that like above all, we will prioritize and that we will deliver for the business. We obviously deliver far more than that. we have a focus on these top 10 because when I first started the job, didn't have such a focus as that and we had like over 250 top priority pieces of work and that's just not doable. So, this focus in on a few.

Carlos (29:00)
You said you delivered more than what you promised. That's unusual. I've seen a lot of the opposite.

Jess Hall (29:10)
Well, I mean, now nearly 20 years into my career, I'm getting better at that. think my point here is that we have a top 10 that we absolutely commit to delivering, and we put the resource around that and we get it done. And we call them the P zeroes. I know lots of businesses use that terminology or our priority deliverables, but we also have P one roadmaps of small change and you know, smaller features that happen alongside this. So that's where the over delivery comes from. I mean, don't get me wrong though. The business, I think would take three times as much out of the team if they could. Everyone listening will know no one's ever happy, but we do our best.

Carlos (30:01)
So I heard you use the word value a few times and I want to break it down. So what are some of those leading indicators that are top of mind for your team to measure the value that they are delivering?

Jess Hall (30:17)
There are quite a few, because in my role, we're covering such a broad space. I have everything that's customer facing, all of the technology that's in a restaurant and that transmits the order, everything that routes the courier and decides who's going to get what order and how it's going to happen, and all of the customer service as well. So lots of different perspectives, and bringing that together has been really important. So we've implemented lean value trees, allowing all of our teams with the metrics that they own to be really clear, how do they ladder up to the top line goals of the business around order volume, GTV, EBITDA, et cetera. So it's very clear. We're also really clear that we shouldn't be working on things that don't improve those metrics. And we also shouldn't work on things that might improve our metric here, but are detrimental to somebody else's metric over there. So those are kind of the rules of play. And what I hope my team feel is that by doing it in this way, they're actually quite empowered because we know the problems we need to solve, we know the metrics we need to move, and we're clear about how they ladder up to the end result. So they can design the solutions around those. But obviously, in terms of like typical metrics, you know, we're looking from a customer perspective, conversion, we're looking at forward rate from the list of restaurants to the menu, from the menu to the basket, from the basket to the checkout, those types of things. We're also always looking at contact propensity into customer service. When it comes to a restaurant, how the restaurant's performing, logistics will be about the efficiency of our network, and all of that together to successful business.

Carlos (32:14)
I think about your business being a marketplace in a way, some way that you are coordinating vendors with customers. In other marketplaces like Airbnb, example, or Facebook, they talk about an aha moment, like certain metrics that they allow the user to have so much value that they know that user is going to be retained. So I wonder if there's any of those aha moments for your users.

Jess Hall (32:43)
Yeah, I don't think we have anything specific. think probably, you know, when you think about an Airbnb versus a takeaway, the money you are spending is less. the kind of the interaction is a bit of a different value within the customer's experience. But, that said, don't think there's a specific metric, but what we do know is that when we manage a customer complaint very well, we do tend to see that customers are more loyal and more likely to come back and place another order. But ultimately, I think the reality is our customers want convenience and not for us to be part of the experience just to create and enable the experience. So when you order a takeaway with your family, the food you receive and the experience of sitting around the table and chatting and laughing or watching a film or whatever it is, that's the experience. We're just here to enable it and make it very convenient. We're not here to be the experience. So I guess I also look at it as we need to be that quiet partner that makes your life brilliant rather than the starring brand, if that makes sense. But we don't have one specific metric.

Carlos (34:11)
Yeah. It's a risk, you're playing with fire because obviously that's that happy moment when everybody wants to get together and have a good time and the food is a key part of that moment. It's relatively low cost, but high risk. You don't want to be the star of the movie, but you will become the villain if that doesn't work.

Jess Hall (34:30)
Yes, and I think 100 % and that's the thing, isn't it? You know, if you've ordered food and somebody's doesn't arrive or, you know, that's that can be like really devastating. And I'm not understating that at all. If you've been looking forward to your Friday night takeaway for two weeks, and your pizza didn't arrive and everyone else's did, you're going to feel terrible. So getting it right, transmitting the order effectively having a really excellent career network that's working efficiently, so you get it quickly, so it's not cold. All of that is really important and empowering that convenience for customers is key. So that is a lot of what we look at is, you know, a great customer experience with less friction in the app. But as soon as you've pressed order, we want it with the restaurant quickly, we want the career there as quickly as possible. So we spend a lot of time optimizing on that side. And for us, that's also all in -house developed. So we're really in control of how those algorithms work.

Carlos (35:39)
you'd say in -house develop. So you also have, may have other apps for the delivery people or for the restaurants, right?

Jess Hall (35:48)
Yes, so we have restaurant technology. You know, in smaller restaurants, they will have devices that we can provide to them, which show the order, can print out a receipt to go into the kitchen, you know, whatever they need. In chains, in bigger restaurants, we integrate with their point of sale system so that it goes into their kitchen flows automatically. With grocers, we've actually been developing a number of other solutions because my background is retail, so I know this very well, but when they're picking orders for customers, they're out in quite a big supermarket potentially, they can't be tied to a device somewhere, a paper receipt is not suitable. So we've developed software that can be loaded onto their internal hardware, show them what they've got to collect, and they go around and complete the order. And an interesting thing there, when we made that change, we actually saw grocery orders with a missing or incorrect item reduced by 60 % when we launched that picking app on the retailers hardware. So there's a few different things there. And then on the courier side, yes, the couriers have an app which tells them which restaurant to go to, where to deliver the food. And they can report if they have any issues along the way and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, there's quite a lot going on in what sounds like a kind of simple business about getting a takeaway, but actually there's lots going on.

Carlos (37:22)
I want to take us now to the section three, the future future. What's in the kitchen for you and how are you thinking and how do you go about allocating enough time or resources to ensure that there is enough investment into the future?

Jess Hall (37:39)
So first of all, think everybody should be doing, let's call it research, but I want to kind of bust some myths here on this because that doesn't need to be like doing a big customer survey or going out and commissioning research. And it also doesn't need to take loads of time. It can be as simple as just, you know, choosing some great people to follow on LinkedIn or on Twitter who produce, you know, interesting information and challenging yourself to read one article a week or two articles a week, or choosing a topic that you're interested in and just finding out what's going on. I think little and often is the way to do this. For me, I follow lots of people on Twitter who give me lots of insight, and including you, Carlos, obviously. And I also love to look at what's happening outside of our market. So I'm often looking at apps in other countries. I was lucky enough to go to Asia this summer. So I tried out some businesses doing similar stuff to us over there to see what was going on and what could I learn. And that's the thing that I think is really important to take information regularly and you start to connect the dots because you start to read and intake all these different things and that is when creativity is sparked. So I do think everybody should be doing it. I do think it's an important part and that everyone should make time to do it. But I think there's a bit of a myth that like it has to be this detailed customer research or it has to take a lot of time. Often the things that are most exciting are ideas that we kind of come up with when we're having a chat with somebody about something we've read or seen and it develops from there. It's just a little spark. And so I, but it's essential in product management.

Carlos (39:45)
So as you now think about specific trends such as AI, virtual kitchens, self -driving cars, what is some of those things where you are seeing specific use cases that you want to invest in?

Jess Hall (40:03)
So we've already invested in the electric cars and I think I definitely see big societal change as consumers move away from traditional combustion engine to electric vehicles. We're going to see this very different way of traveling and even self -driving cars I think is going to change that all over again. You know, I think about my own children, I'm not sure if they'll ever learn to drive.
So the way they travel will probably be very different. The way they feel about convenience will be very different, which is one of my key points. think you do also have to speak to young people or people from different demographics, whatever it is, to really understand how are they using things? How are the youngest generations looking at the world because they're your next consumers?
So cars is one, AI, we've been trying a few different things. We've got a consumer facing app, which we've a lot about. We started that with just an idea to experiment and see what happened. We found that customers really want personalization and customer service help. Those are the two things that they really want. So by analyzing all the chats, all of the things that they've asked the assistant; we've been able to build out more and more functionality. you know, we're taking the ordering journey from minutes to seconds and making it super personalized. So you can say, you know, I'd like some comfort food today. What can you recommend? And our AI system will give you some options nearby you that you can add to basket there in the chat and check out. But there's lots of productivity pieces as well. I think, you know, as we look at, can we route better? What can we learn from that so that career journeys are quicker? How can we optimize the network? There's a number of different productivity gains there as well. I think at the heart of it all though is experimentation is important, but you've always got to be solving a real problem. Experimentation for the sake of it, adopting AI tools for the sake of it, that's not going to get you anywhere.

Carlos (42:26)
What about virtual kitchens? I know there's a lot of restaurants that are now focused exclusively on delivery and not have in -person clients.

Jess Hall (42:38)
Yeah, so we've definitely, we've seen a growth of that since the pandemic, as I think customers, you know, really did switch from in restaurant dining to home dining and ordering more frequently. And running a restaurant is expensive and challenging, you know, keeping the upkeep, having it in the right location so you get the right traffic, you know, all of those things, it's hard work to run a restaurant and make it successful. So I think the the virtual kitchens do appeal to the kind of people trying to break into the, you know, the restaurant environment, because, you know, you're there are different models, but you're effectively renting a space. But you're able to get the order volume through platforms like ours. But then for the bigger brands that doing it, I think again, like it makes sense, it's a way to reach a greater number of customers without having to open a, let's call it a retail outlet. So it's another way to serve the customers that want to eat at home. So I don't see them going anywhere. I think probably there will be a continued interest in the virtual kitchens or the multi kitchens. And I think that's a trend that's here to stay.

Carlos (44:00)
Well, Jess, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure to go through the present, the midterm, and the future of your product with you.

Jess Hall (44:10)
Thanks so much. We could just talk all day, I think, but it's been brilliant to join you. Thanks for having me.