Intendent Pro is a meal planning app for Polish public & private schools and kindergartens.

Problem definition

Design a disruptive product that will help food service mangers to stay competitive on the job market that demands a shift from asset managers into dieticians.

Research

I facilitated workshops with focus groups that included food service managers to understandthe pain points of the future product users. I conducted market research to get the grip of the competition and find the unique market value.

Exposed problems

• Food service managers need to comply to government dietary laws as well as rising demand from parents to become more diverse with food planning

• The vast majority of the managers do not have relevant dietary knowledge as in the past their job was more related to strict food storage management

• There is a threat that managers who won’t be able to take more responsibilities will be outsourced by dieticians

• There are already storage management products that offer some of the food planning solutions but those solutions are provisional addons not build with user centric design. Their processes are hard to learn. The interface is obsolete and provides low user experience.

• Competitors customer support is slow in response and often paid to answer (consultation fee) even basic questions. Some competitors need two weeks to answer to the bug report which can take months to repair.

Solutions

• Meal planner web application that automatically checks meal schedule compliance with the government regulations for each of the insitution type (from nursery to high school).

• User flows and system information architecture built with the future users.

• Significant reduction of task completition time (eg. Planning meals for a week or adding an institution to the system) compared to initial stakeholder proposition and competitor’s tools.

• Built-in database of thousands ready to use products (used to build meals) and whole meals to speed up the creation process and add versatility. The option to add new or duplicate meals or products to create user’s additional database.

• Built-in system guide and dietary knowledge base to provide additional support options

• High accessibility focus, especially in the readability area (AA pass). Many of the users are in the age group that experiance eyesight decline.

Effects

• The product managed to achieve sustainable revenue just after the first quarter of going live. During our workshops we were able to cut vast amount of unnecessary features and user flows, initially requested by the stakeholder. It allowed Intendent Pro to greatly reduce development and maintenance costs along with benefiting it's users.

• NPS result just after 1st quarter after go live was 71 - which is exceptionally high for digital products. It remains at this levels till today (launched in January 2022).

• Large amount of positive reviews in social media. Main praised areas: ease of use, functionality scope, clean interface. The users do not hesitate to share comments on how this product helps to ease their work. Intendent Pro has quickly become the top 1 choice in it's niche and currently is the most recommended institutional meal planner in Poland