While the improvement to the user’s experience was evident to the team, a Glovo Live Activity was not in any team’s roadmap as there was no business case for it. The API just launched so we had little reference from the industry about the type of impact something like this could make. For my product hypothesis, I developed and argued the following points:

Benefits to the business

1. Decrease contact ratio (1 of 3 people that contact an agent reach out to inquiry about the status of the order). This means reduced cost on support agents.

2. Decrease delivery failures due to customer absence. This type of experience is terrible for customers and makes them likely to churn. Reducing this number of incidents means improving overall retention.

Benefits to customers

1. Decreased impatience and anxiety while waiting for an order.

2. More convenience for keeping track of their order while using their device.

3. More transparency about the key milestones of an order.

Finally, while pitching the feature, I was challenged with a product dilemma. If customers have all this information outside of the app, does that mean they will open the app less to check the status of the order and reduce advertising impressions on the order tracking page?

I argued that the Live Activity is an additional entry point to the app, beyond the notifications and app icon, and that it doesn’t display the next most important thing for customers after delivery time: the map to follow your order. The feature showed potential but it carried a meaningful risk. This called for testing. The team developed the feature incorporating it into the existing app infrastructure and we conducted an A/B test.