Popmenu is an all-in-one technology solution dedicated to empowering independent restaurants to grow. Serving over 10,000 restaurants, from mom-and-pops to large, independently owned franchises, Popmenu aims to offer tools that allow restaurateurs to control their own platforms to effectively market and expand their businesses.
Waitlist presented an opportunity to bridge Popmenu's digital platform with brick-and-mortar operations, another addition to the all-in-one solution for restaurants. This product enables establishments manage and capture their waiting customers seamlessly, whether online or in-person. As Popmenu was expanding its offerings, Waitlist emerged as a key piece in developing a new suite of front-of-house solutions.
We leveraged the waiting period into an engagement opportunity for restaurants and their customers. Our design captures guest information when added to the waitlist and showcases the restaurant's menu during wait times. With a nimble team consisting of a product manager, designer, one full-stack engineer, and one mobile engineer, we successfully delivered integrated experiences across web, tablet, and mobile platforms.
Post-release, we quickly implemented additional features, allowing customers to join the waitlist directly from the restaurant's website and introducing a new Pending Status for the list. Within the first three months, we witnessed active adoption of the product, with usage from the top 10 restaurants seating over 10,000 parties.
A key focus was increasing transactional revenue through our ordering platform, where bolstering our clients' revenue from online ordering would help us grow with them too. I worked on several projects aimed at improving the experience for online ordering where we balanced both user experience with revenue growth.
Ordering Events lets restaurants create unique timeframes to create ordering opportunities for special dates and occasions. We noticed there were a few pieces of logic that didn't make sense in how the event information was displayed, so we made improvements to managing and visualizing the events. We also created consistency with design patterns by leveraging our wizard pattern for creating and editing events.
Metrics for past events was introduced which enables restaurants to directly measure their success. This allows our customers to see revenue outcomes, encouraging product usage and demonstrating the value of this ordering channel.
The project an initiative that both my product manager and I kept pushing to develop. It began with a quick, iterative feature we shipped, which sparked that "aha!" moment about the potential in this space. Catering hadn't been touched in a while and was pretty intertwined with our general ordering product. However, we realized there were some key differences that surfaced to justify this as a great product opportunity.
We dove deep into research, chatting with current customers who could use this feature to help define our ideal customer profile. We wanted to figure out what we could build that would really hit the sweet spot for a specific type of business. It was a process of gathering insights, understanding customer pain points, and defining the business opportunity to boost company goals. It was exciting to see how we could make a difference for our customers business and how that impacted the potential for our business too.