ezCater Case Study - Reinventing Your Product Offering
On March 24, 2021, BPMA hosted a panel case study discussion with the ezCater product team (Erin DeCesare, ezCater CTO; Nathan Ciruolo. Director of Product Management, Fulfillment; and Sean Kleeman, Delivery Enablement Success Manager). The forum was a great opportunity to hear about ezCater, and work in small groups to solve a problem the company is focusing on right now.
Case Study: ezCater Delivery Service:
ezCater is a Boston based software company, and is the world’s largest marketplace for corporate catering. The company has grown from partnering with a handful of restaurants in Boston, to become a national leader in corporate catering. As per their website, ezCater makes it easy to order food online for the office. “From routine office lunches to offsite client meetings, from 5 to 2,000 people, we have a solution for you.”
So what does a company that specializes in “food at work” do when a pandemic hits, offices close, and no one is at work? In short, it partners with clients to come up with creative and thoughtful ways to innovate.
Problem the company was trying to solve:
Erin DeCesare, ezCater CTO, kicked off the event by painting a post-Covid scenario whereby companies are looking for ways to solve for “food at work” in this new world. This creates new opportunities as they are rapidly looking to reinvent their product offering. ezCater is in fact, in the process of expanding their Product team with a number of open positions including CPO.
When a company is working on solving an urgent problem, focus, prioritization, and creativity are key to delivering a great user experience to customers. So how did their product team go about solving the problem?
Start with a problem statement and analysis:
As ezCater is adapting to the new customer needs, Sean Kleeman and his team have been looking at ways to make an impact on their stakeholders. Their key challenge was how to increase visibility of self-delivered order while adding value to stakeholders across the ezCater delivery lifecycle?
Their new features are targeting the delivery process, and on the way to the solution, there are a few things that they are keeping in mind:
Who are their stakeholders, and what are their main points of friction
What does the user journey look like for each of the stakeholders
What are the areas where they can make the largest impact
Which tools do they already have at their disposal, technology and data they can leverage
What are their constraints, size and areas of expertise of the development team, timelines
What are the key measures of success
With a new set of features hitting the market, and more coming out soon, here were some of the key takeaways worth highlighting for product managers more generally:
Partner with your users & customers to come up with creative and innovative solutions. Identify stakeholders who’s problems you are targeting to solve, and keep your focus on giving them the best user experience.
Leverage existing platforms, data and technology to build new features that meet the users where they are - give them tools to do what they need right there and then.
Prioritize and build to give your users the best experience your user can have. Highlight your key competencies, leverage your superpower that makes you a market differentiator, and back it up with a strong set of tools you are building.
Get the value out of your MVP even before it’s fully realized. We have written about the concept of MVP, and the value it provides. But often, we end up being constrained by the requirements for the MVP, and fail to see the value the feature(s) provide even before the full MVP has been completed. Identify opportunities to measure the impact of new features, by targeting one set of stakeholders, before scaling up.
Most importantly, enjoy the ride and work on a product that puts a smile on your face when presenting new features to your peers.
To hear more about the case study, dive into the details, watch the recording of the event on our events page. Keep an eye out for our upcoming events and register to join another great discussion.
Milica Golubovic is a Product Manager, with experience in Education Technology, and SasS product development. As a member of the BPMA Blog team, Milica is collaborating to create informative, engaging content for the Product Management community.