Rider Safety

Delivery Hero is present in over 70 countries across four continents. They operate a wide range of local brands that are united behind our shared mission to always deliver an amazing experience – fast, easy, and to your door. 

 

At Delivery Hero, I headed a product domain with the primary objective of enhancing the Rider Experience via a mobile application.  The scope of this domain encompassed improving for delight or necessity, critical journey moments such as login, general app navigation/framework, getting to work, and finding orders. 

In addition to overseeing these fundamental areas, it was also my responsibility to discovery growth opportunities for the Domain. Enter, Rider Safety.

Problem Discovery

Shortly after I started with Delivery Hero in the January of 2022, my boss made me aware of an interesting challenge that our stakeholders in the Middle East were facing. To summarize:


The safety of delivery couriers is an important strategic goal for Delivery Hero as a company AND it is becoming of greater focuses to government bodies.Certain government bodies want more details about courier driving behaviors and we today we don’t have a way to provide those details consistently and in a way that won’t be detrimental to our cost economics. 

 

This was a problem that I was eager to take on because:

🦺 Solving it could legitimately save lives.
🎯 It was a strategic priority for the business and the product strategy for it was completely undefined.

Quickly I categorized this project into two parts with different timelines and project stages. Below I will focus only on the portion of the project where the goal was to understand more details about the regulatory pressure we were facing and defining timelines to ensure business continuity. As a second part of this project, I authored a Rider Safety product strategy through 2025. The intention was to define more clearly how we could improve Rider safety globally. If you’d like more details about this portion of my work, please contact me directly.

Building the Project Team

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I began this project by connecting with key stakeholders in the highest priority region, the Middle East, to understand the regulatory pressures that they were facing. I was directed to the person who became our key regional champion, , the Manager of Regional Health and Safety. With his help, I gathered key information about the regional needs and was able to convey them internally to the team dedicated to work on the project (i.e. the Rider Experience Squad).

Picking the Right Solution

Success Metrics

In order to start the process of solving the problems outlined, we needed to define clear success metrics.

🏆 Satisfy legal requirements for driver behavior data reporting

🏆 Reduce accidents per million deliveries 

 

Build Vs. Buy

In this evaluation, we considered:

🧑‍💻 Skillset/expertise needed to be successful

🧠 Current technical capabilities

💼 Hiring prospects

👍 Alignment with core business functions

Due to the specific technical abilities needed to build a telematics solution and the fact that the skills were outside of our core business function, we determined that buying was the best option to deliver on time.

Evaluating Suppliers

Due to the specific technical abilities needed to build a telematics solution and the fact that the skills were outside of our core business function, we determined that buying was the best option to deliver on time. we researched various solutions that offered the technology that we needed. We held numerous conversations with the teams from different companies. In these conversations, we focused on two key aspects –

  1. Solution alignment to our business needs
  2. Technical fit with our existing platform capabilities
We created a document outlining all pros and cons of each solution varying from experience in the industry, cost, customer service, pilot proposal and more. We presented this comparison along with a recommendation to the senior leadership teams of both Delivery Hero and Talabat. We ultimately got approval to continue with one of the providers and we promptly got to work doing further negotiations with procurement and discussing the terms with our legal teams.

Outlining the Deliverables

We knew from multiple discussions with our chosen supplier that they had the capabilities to satisfy our success criteria. However, it was very important that we worked closely together to outline specific deliverables and priorities. Some examples of deliverables included:

  • SDK Integration and validation support from their technical team
  • UI for Riders to approve required tracking permissions
  • Updates from Legal Team to T&C and Privacy Policy
  • A dashboard showing driving behavior for various Riders and allowing further dissections of the data as needed by local teams 
  • Dashboard view that could be submitted for reporting purposes to the Emirati Government
  • MVP of view for Riders to see their safety scores on the app

Execution & Results

To ensure on time delivery, we setup several key communication channels including a dedicated slack channel and regular weekly inter-company meetings with the provider.

In May of 2023, we launched the telematics solution in the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar. The project was celebrated by Talabat executives and was listed as one of the Top Wins by Talabat in 2023. With this solution, Talabat was able to decrease accidents by 59% in those three countries.