Product Manager @ Munchery / Hatched Labs
June 2017 - March 2020-
At its peak, Munchery was a $300 million dark kitchen startup headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Having pioneered the dark kitchen trend, Munchery hired award-winning chefs to create high-quality dishes from scratch using locally sourced ingredients in centralized kitchens around the United States. These items were then packaged and shipped same-day to consumers.
In mid-2018, Munchery was acquired by Giant Eagle, the 8th largest grocer in the United States, and subsequently rebranded as Hatched Labs. Our mission at Hatched was to leverage the technology that catalyzed Munchery’s success in order to digitize Giant Eagle’s entire grocery ecosystem.
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As a Product Manager, I helped dictate product strategy and managed the development of both the dark kitchen and grocery applications . This included but was not limited to the following:
› Managing sprint planning and triaging for entire engineering team
› Determining product roadmap and most important products for development
› Rebuilding entire search infrastructure in conjunction with Data Team
› Conducting competitive audits to establish baseline feature sets in the industry
› Spearheading frontend design initiatives alongside Design & Product Teams
› Working closely with leadership to establish strategy and manage timeframes
› A/B testing to determine which product features are preferred by users
Growth Hacking
In my early days at Munchery, I was solicited by the CEO to help optimize our marketing operations by attempting to develop a growth hacking program in the Bay Area. At the time, I was primarily focused on building out the Engineering Team alongside the CTO, in addition to assisting with different facets of product development. I temporarily stepped away from my role and began managing a group of 5 recent graduates in an attempt to reduce Munchery’s high-CAC and improve retention. In the first 3 months of operation, my small team was able to acquire as many new users as the entire 20+ person digital marketing team with less than 2% of their monthly budget.
Segmentation
The first step was to conduct in-depth segmentation studies about our existing user base and to develop robust user personas to inform future decision making. Working in parallel with the Data Team, I was able to analyze user trends in order to determine which demographic segments utilized Munchery’s services the most. We learned that many of our top users were between the ages of 30-40, skewed female, and worked long hours. We were able to generate insightful data by looking at order/delivery times and order/delivery locations. Given Munchery’s pricer product offerings, we decided to narrow down our target segments into two groups to start: Tech Professionals & Healthcare Workers.
Strategy
In order to effectively acquire these users, I spearheaded the development of a guerrilla acquisition plan which involved targeting these potential users at work. By developing slick marketing materials which integrated variable promos, catchy visuals, and promotional items, we were able to successfully target technology startup offices and healthcare campuses across the Bay Area. We successfully targeted most major entities such as Adobe, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, UCSF, and many more. Once users began ordering and we could pinpoint delivery locations, we subsequently targeted high-frequency neighborhoods and delivered promotional materials to tens of thousands of homes. Ultimately, these efforts led to a revitalization of Munchery’s acquisition strategy and my team was integrated into our Marketing apparatus, allowing me to return to my duties on the Product & Engineering Team.
Search Infrastructure
Giant Eagle acquired Munchery in 2018 in order to revitalize its technology stack. The goal was to build a vertically-integrated e-grocery platform that would help reduce our reliance on third-party software providers. Ultimately, this same platform could be bundled as a SaaS and sold to other grocers nationwide. Apart from the technical benefits of operating an internal e-grocery service, such as configuring the site and adding features as needed, the greatest benefit was the ability to manage all ad revenue on the platform. Contrary to services like Instacart which control the majority of the ad space on their websites, building our own platform allowed us to work directly with FMCG partners to sponsor products and generate ad revenue. Having initially developed the original design for our faceted search feature, I was then tasked with managing the backend development of our search engine. This was a multi-step process that involved working with our engineering team, third-party service providers, and advertisers to determine the path forward.
Infrastructure
Our first order of business was determining how the search backend would look. Working in tandem with the engineering and data team, we prioritized building data pipelines that would be able to ingest the 50,000+ SKUs that we were processing. Since data was coming in from dozens of different sources, we had to determine the best way to reformat our product data catalog in order to maintain uniformity across the board. Extensive research needed to be done to determine which product tags were the most important and subsequently needed to be demanded from our FMCG suppliers. While the entirety of our raw product catalog lived in a large data lake, we were able to leverage services such as Amazon Redshift to store and manipulate our more structured data.
Data Analysis
Given Giant Eagle’s dominant position in the market, we were quickly able to leverage existing sale data to figure out the best ways to rank products on our site. Since the vast majority of their sales were in-store, we needed to attempt to recreate a similar experience for users online. This meant understanding every aspect of the traditional Giant Eagle user experience. For example, it was useful to analyze data such as order frequency, top products, top aisles, average order value, average order weight, payment method, products with highest/lowest margins, products with highest advertising spend, and more.
Query Optimization
In order to ensure the best online user experience, I spearheaded the effort to optimize our search results across the site. Initially, products would be displayed using inconsistent ranking systems such as sale volume, product name, or manufacturer name. This meant that when a user searched something as simple as ‘Apple’, results for ‘Apple Sauce’, ‘Bagged Apples’, or ‘Apple Jacks Cereal’ would be displayed before fresh apples. This happened due to a multitude of reasons, but could be as simple as the word ‘Apple’ appearing multiple times in the product tag, hence boosting the search result. I worked extensively on developing JSON search queries that would help display the correct items based on user expectations. In a matter of weeks I was able to drastically change Giant Eagle’s search experience which ultimately led to a substantial sales boost.
Ad Integration
The final step to building our search infrastructure was developing a system for advertisers to strategically display their products on our site. Advertising had two main iterations. The first entailed displaying sponsored products at the beginning of any relevant search result. So, for example, a search for chocolate milk would show ‘Nesquik Chocolate Milk’ as a featured product. The second was more traditional and involved advertisers purchasing ad space on our website. For example, ‘Gatorade’ could purchase traditional banner ads that would be displayed as users browsed our site. This ad integration was crucial in Giant Eagle’s development into a e-commerce powerhouse and provided an additional revenue stream that would have been impossible to leverage by using a service such as Instacart.