Building and leading design and UX at Marley Spoon & Dinnerly

Marley Spoon helps people around the world to save time while cooking healthy, home-cooked meals. Each week, Marley Spoon helps customers in three continents and eight countries to choose meals they’d like to cook from a changing weekly menu and receive all of the ingredients and recipes they need directly to their door.

Since launching in 2015, Marley Spoon has delivered more than 27 million meals to its global audience. Over the past six years, Marley Spoon’s core product offering has grown tremendously to offer a sister brand, Dinnerly, in 3 countries and several add-on and seasonal products available through the year.

The problem statement

When I joined Marley Spoon in 2018, the entirety of the design outcome for all of these products was being supported, surprisingly and somewhat impressively, by 2 floating designers in the company. Unsurprisingly, this set up was conducive to neither the growth and wellbeing of the designers, nor the strategic design of the rapidly scaling product and brand.

Upon joining, I was tasked with building and leading the global design team to deliver a thoughtful, cohesive end-to-end product experience that united the digital and physical halves of the meal kit experience. And in order to enable our journey towards the vision, it was imperative to build an inclusive, collaborative design culture for the team to collaborate, impact and thrive cross-functionally.

Over the course of 2 years, as Global Head of Design & UX, I scaled the UX design, brand design and video teams, set up processes for their collaboration, defined principles and set the strategic direction for design-forward projects, established user research as a practice, created frameworks for development and career growth, and slowly cultivated a design culture in the company. More on these below.

Building design culture

Cultivating an awareness of the role and value of design within an organisation is a slow, hard and invisible process– even more so, when done from scratch. Just as work culture can’t be short-handed with ping-pong tables and free snacks; design culture can’t be shorthanded with sheer optics.

What helped me initially to break down this challenge at Marley Spoon were the lessons about community and education from running my Indian pop-up dinner series Indian Standard Time:

The open kitchen.

There’s lots to be said about this metaphor, but in short: from my harrowing first time running an open kitchen, I accidentally discovered its power to include, engage, involve, empathize and identify with. With this as the guiding principle, together with my team at Marley Spoon, I laid out a vision for how we would work as a design team– both internally and externally, with our partners in the company. Some of the key tenets of moving towards our vision were founded on making sure we made ourselves just as visible, open and available for listening, as for talking about our process and work. Similar to the challenge I faced while running the Indian supper club for non-Indians– this meant straddling the line between making our work easy to absorb, while staying rooted in our expertise and process.

Company-wide goal setting

Design is inherently a cross-functional sport. Therefore, the sharing of a common vision on strategic efforts and objectives across the company is crucial and is what makes nuanced product and brand design possible. However, it became apparent that members often did not have a fair sense of how company objectives flow into the various teams in the company, and conversely, how their individual work contributes to the overall vision. At the start of the quarter, While everyone added their individual goals to Small Improvements, silos and conflicts of priorities would emerge as the quarters rolled on. These conflicts became apparent in retrospectives, in company off-sites and was felt in day-to-day struggles within projects, and started to hinder our work as a cross-functional team. To begin to bridge this gap with better communication, I proposed a company-wide all-hands format to the CEO that would align on the why, the what, the how of the company goals and how they transform into individual team goals. This was Mise en Place.

Building community over breakfast : Design Exchange

Design Exchange arose from a need for bringing a wider dialogue about design, besides ongoing projects, both within and without the team. Once every month, I invited a designer(s) from other companies for an informal design sharing session to exchange views and get to know each other over some delicious breakfast. The idea was to foster exchange and learn about the intersection of design, tech and food from different perspectives. People from all disciplines were welcome to join, both from within Marley Spoon and without.

Over the course of a year and a half, we had 10 such Exchanges, inviting designers from Uber, Saatchi & Saatchi, Blinkist, Zalando, Kids Studio, Idagio among others, with topics ranged from user research, copywriting for UX, designing work culture, brand personality, ideation for advertising, to colouring for video.

☻ Outcome This event began modestly from a small design-only attendance to about 25 guests from the larger company and outside; ultimately capped for space constraints. Attendees almost always shared feedback about leaving inspired, and as such, it was always mentioned in Retrospectives under things that went well.