We built, refined, and launched 4 more products in the course of a single year.

With our team, Crave accelerated our product cycle to push updates live more rapidly and adapt to user needs faster than ever before. The launch of 4 new products propelled the team closer to additional funding.

On-premise Ordering Kiosks

Kiosks were the first foundational tool in virtual ordering on-premise. While we had mobile apps and web presences already established, we needed to build a system that would allow restaurant customers to order from a single station as quickly as possible. Additionally, these kiosks were designed to be white-labelled and propped in 3rd party locations, to allow people to order from multiple restaurants at once, whether they are on a college campus, stadium, bar, or event center.

Refactored Online Ordering

Our online order platform was our earliest product and in dire need of a refresh. With years of new learnings and expertise on our backpack, we set out to build a more powerful, fluid, and streamlined online experience.

‍

Server-Managed POS

Our biggest venture yet, the restaurant stack felt incomplete without a server managed POS. With one of the largest competitors, Toast, just going public, the pressure heated up as we set out to build a POS unlike anything else in the industry.

‍

It's all powered by a single north star: The Crave Internal Design Library.

None of this matters without a single source of truth. My proudest accomplishment, the never-ending journey of building an all-new design library was set to start.

We started work on a system that would drive all design and engineering decisions moving forward.

Largely inspired by Shopify's Polaris we began work on our most ambitious project yet. We needed to establish who we were as a team, what we stood for, how we think about design, how we establish quality in our products, and make the team work more effectively than ever before.

The Crave Internal Design Library would bethe foundation for all our work.

Design systems are really hard. When they are done poorly, they cause more problems. But when they are done well, it's pure bliss.

We knew that we had to take the time to build it correctly from the get-go. During an internal reflection, the team came up with this idea of "The Refactoring Loop of Despair." A model to show how cutting corners and taking shortcuts only inhibits our ability to make great products in the future.

‍

Components were properly defined.

Every single component was properly defined, built and documented to provide developers the best understanding of how to build it quickly and to spec. Even with powerful tools like Figma, it takes a lot of effort to go out of your way and explain to engineers exactly what should be done. But it also takes a team of humble designers to listen to developers and work together, making projects efficient while being functional and beautiful.

‍

All projects were flexible, and running on true prototypes.

Long gone are the days of flat and static mockups. Every project moving forward would have a set of pages for documentation, wireframes, lo-fi exploration, final designs, and versioning. When these files are built, each member is instructed to ensure that as many frames are as scalable as possible. Instead of simply proclaiming breakpoints, we showed engineers exactly how they were to build something with every additional pixel of width.

‍

Developers and Devs joined meetings to establish best practices.

We quickly realized that a lot of time was wasted bouncing tickets between teams. Local teams would work as much as they could, and then get stuck waiting on a designer in another time zone to get back to them. Standups were inconsistent, and work just took too long. We brought 1 senior designer in to every development standup. For each question the product managers had, the designer could quickly make a decision and relay that choice to other designers on the team.

‍

We made our team happier, more effective, and better at their jobs.

It's incredibly easy for designers to forget that their true customers are the engineers and developers of a project. While focusing on the needs and desires of end users, designers are building the tools and templates for developers. When designers become more connected and involved in the product process, everybody succeeds more. Our team continues to adapt and build tools that effectively solve the needs of our customers, but even more-so, solve the challenges and problems of our developers.