iFood

About the company

iFood is the biggest food delivery service in Latin America and an unquestionable giant in the industry globally, right up there with DoorDash, Deliveroo, and others. Backed by relevant global VCs and companies, such as Innova Capital and Just Eat, respectively, it is currently worth, as of the latest round, USD $5.4bi. By the time I left, the company had about 5k+ employees, with the design team being around 40+.

Product context

At the time, there were three main products: the consumer app, where you would make food orders, the restaurant app, where they would manage their whole operation, ranging from incoming orders to menus updates and, lastly, the driver app, where drivers would receive food delivery orders they could freely accept or deny. iFood competed with big players, such as Uber Eats ⎯ with all its international horse-power ⎯ and Rappi, an incoming giant also coming out of LATAM.

My journey there

I joined right after the Logistics team was formed. That team was responsible for creating and maturing the also newly created driver product. At that point, iFood used to partner up with several third parties for offering the actual delivery to restaurants. Even then, most restaurants would use their own delivery solution and iFood remained only as a way for them to get orders in.

It was a special moment as the team was just starting to take shape. We joked around that being in the Logistics team was like being in a startup inside of another startup. We had the benefits of not having to be knee-deep into the weeds of financial balance ⎯ given that iFood already was a considerably stable startup at that point ⎯ but also of being very scrappy & fast.

All the Logistics team worked from this tiny, messy, and cozy house.

I joined as the team's first designer and remained as such for almost a year. During that time alone, I learned more than I could've ever hoped for, and it speaks to the advantages of a very cross-functional team. Before that, the whole Logistics product team consisted of a tiny group of 3, maybe 4, engineers who were in charge of setting up all the core APIs. There was definitely a lot to do and figure out.

Projects

Closing thoughts

iFood for sure was a pivotal moment in my career. Being a solo designer in a moment so demanding like that absolutely put me to the test multiple times, but I'm glad the team was caring enough so that together we went through it all. We learned how to work together through a bunch of trial and error and therefore strongly supported the Logistics unit growth, specially at that point in time given iFood had just received its biggest round of funding, which had a big portion directed to us.

I'm very happy and fulfilled to know that a lot of my work remained to be useful to future designers and PMs that continue to work on the product. A lot has changed since I left, which is how things roll, but I'm sure we developed a product that helped shape the overall foundation for the product to grow ⎯ to a hopefully better place ⎯ and to this day stands strong as one of the most robust driver products, at least in LATAM.