How agile helped deliver OLIO’s sustainably app
OLIO undertook a project to add a new feature facilitating the sale of local handmade goods - by Mike Hine
Food waste is the third largest contributor to climate change in the world, but it often goes unnoticed because it happens in micro-quantities. And while a lot of people blame supermarkets, they make up only two per cent of the contribution to food waste, whereas 50 per cent of it comes from regular citizens throwing out a banana at a time.
OLIO was established five years ago in north London to tackle society’s food waste problem. The OLIO app connects neighbours with each other and with local shops so that surplus food can be shared – for free – instead of wasted.
If OLIO users have any surplus food they’re not going to eat, they simply take a photo, put it on the app, write a description and give pick-up times. Anyone nearby who has the app will get a notification and can send the user a message to arrange pick-up. Most of the food listed on the app finds a taker within one hour.
Since its launch, OLIO’s community of users has grown from a few thousand to almost 2.5 million. That five-year period has also seen a massive shift in the public’s consciousness on sustainability issues. Food waste has gone from being a niche concern to forming a major part of people’s efforts to live more sustainably. Indeed, OLIO’s success owes much to the way it has energised volunteers. Over 20,000 people have chipped in to help grow OLIO in their local area.
Growing its audience
‘Made’ is a new section on the OLIO app where users can sell locally handmade goods, both food and craft – from cupcakes to knitted hats and everything in between. While food-sharing on OLIO is free, Made involves money changing hands.
Project caught up with OLIO’s Vivienne Taylor, who project managed the launch of Made, to find out more.
“What we had [initially] was just a marketplace for free food really – but we realised that we wanted to grow our audience, and while sharing food is amazing, it can be quite niche,” she says.
Even though money is involved, Taylor says, Made is still planet-friendly, local and neighbour-to-neighbour: “It’s a community, so it’s all about getting people involved, bettering themselves and bettering people around them.”
To start with, she says, “We came up with the idea for Made, but we didn’t know if it would work, so we had to validate it. We did a lot of research on local makers and the effect that COVID-19 has had on ‘shopping local’. There is a huge economy for that – around £3.4bn is contributed to craft businesses in the UK, and there are 23,000 micro craft businesses here, so clearly there is a market.”
Next the team surveyed existing users, finding that over 60 per cent said they would either buy or sell on Made. The user feedback, combined with the market research, was painting a positive picture, so Made went into the planning phase.
Creating the MVP
“We decided to create the minimum viable product (MVP) to get something out that was just about functioning and took the least amount of time, so if anything went wrong or it didn’t work, we wouldn’t have invested too much resource and time into it,” says Taylor.
Like OLIO’s core offering, Made is a marketplace – users put up and respond to ads. That meant much of the infrastructure for Made was already in place. “We almost had to duplicate it, but do smaller things like add currency and change the layout a little bit, and the messaging, so the focus was more buy-and-sell instead of free.”
Buyers and sellers handle the money-exchange part themselves. The project team decided that taking on liability for orders and payment would be too much of a stretch for the MVP – though, Taylor says, this functionality could be added later.
On the product side, Taylor adds, “We deal in two-week sprints, and our goal was to get this done in two sprints, so four weeks. That’s exactly what we did, keeping everything to a minimum. It was one week of back-end work and three weeks of front-end. Because we duplicated the format we already had, the back-end work was very similar.”
The next challenge was to ensure that the supply was there in time for launch. To do that, the team reached out to its dedicated community of users.
“Over four weeks, we created Facebook groups and surveys. We reached out to a lot of current users to get their email addresses and record their interest to try and get people talking and thinking about adding to Made. Until the launch, we did a countdown with them and told them what they needed to do and how it would work.”
This approach was successful, but it ramped up the pressure on the project team: “We really had to make sure we hit the deadline for Made, because we were informing all our users about a launch date – and we don’t usually do that in case something goes wrong and the launch date has to be moved. So it was a bit of a push at the end, but we did it.”
The team
Because it was a relatively small project team – around eight from the tech team and six from different parts of the business – they were able to be efficient, communicating and doing things quickly, Taylor says.
“We had two weekly meetings with everybody – people from compliance, PR, tech, analytics. We call them scrums when we work within the tech team, but these were project meetings, just getting everyone together to make sure everything was on track. It ensured we could move quickly and interact with a huge spreadsheet of everything we needed to do, which we don’t usually do, because we don’t usually release huge features that incorporate each team in the whole company.”
Taylor adds that, in the tech team, they use ZenHub, an agile project management tool for GitHub, to record everything, and burndown charts to make sure they’re on track.
OLIO has been a remote business since the very beginning, so wasn’t hit for six by the onset of COVID-19 restrictions. “I think it also helps that we’re a small company, so we can do things very quickly. And while a lot of more traditional businesses are top-down, run by the CEO and COO, we’re a bottom-up business. There are almost 30 of us, but for a few years there were only about 10 of us, so we try to empower everybody else to grow OLIO.”
The app has fostered the creation of new communities based around food-sharing behaviours – something researchers haven’t really seen before. “We have been working with Yale and Nottingham University. We’ve given them anonymised datasets to try to understand this behaviour, because it’s new.”
Lessons learned
Taylor says that shipping emerged as an unexpected issue upon launch. “With our MVP, we asked people not to ship, only to do exchange on the doorstep to keep it local. And in case anything went wrong, we don’t have a customer support line.”
But within a few days, the team realised it would have to relax its policy on shipping. “If I, for example, want to buy a specific plant, the chances of somebody selling one within a few blocks near me is unlikely,” Taylor says. “But there might be someone across, for example, London who has it, and I’d happily get it shipped by a local business. So that was one of our big learnings within a few days – we have to allow people to ship.”
Overall, Taylor rates the project a big success. “We’ve had thousands of listings, a lot of people buying and we think within two weeks we will have the messaging to allow shipping as well. We’ve done a lot of user interviews post-launch with makers, people who put stuff on the app, and the feedback to the MVP has been great. We won’t really need to take anything away from what we’ve currently done.”
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