Tech
Aug 4, 2022
Meet Alina, Product Lead at Wolt
Our Product team acts as the voice of our customers, making sure we build outstanding products, consistently. Product Leads at Wolt embody our product vision and bring our teams together to build world-class products for all our customer groups. We interviewed Alina, our Product Lead in the Retail Consumer team which focuses on building the best possible retail experience for users when discovering, browsing or shopping products on Wolt.
Alina joined our Product team in Berlin one and a half years ago. She’s spent most of her career in tech startups and joined Wolt in our Berlin office as one of the first few people in product development in Germany. During her free time Alina loves to cook healthy meals, work out and play the piano 🎶. Let’s hear more from her…
Hello 👋 Tell me a bit about what do you do at Wolt
I joined Wolt a bit over a year ago to help take the retail experience in our app to the next level. I was really drawn to Wolt by the user-friendliness and design of the product. I was fascinated by how Wolt made food delivery, quite a mundane chore, into a really engaging, enjoyable experience. I really wanted to find out more about the ins and outs of building Wolt’s products!
In a nutshell, my job as a Product Lead is all about figuring out what are our biggest problems to solve and most impactful opportunities for us to grasp. In practice it’s taking in a lot of information (e.g. feedback, user research, market knowledge), digesting it all, putting together a product vision and strategy from it and leading the execution of it. I do a lot of research into the problems we identify and closely work together with engineers, designers and analysts to formulate solutions to those. A lot of my work is also about communicating the impact of what we’re doing to get buy-in from various stakeholders. I find it all super exciting 🤩.
What excites you about working at Wolt?
It’s so exciting to see the company grow. Seeing continuous growth in our numbers, whether it’s growth of our users or our team — it feels like being on a rocketship 🚀. What’s truly unique about working in product here is the autonomy we have and the impact that we each can have here. You’re really trusted as the expert in your area and given the freedom to test things out and learn on the go.
Talking about impact, there are so many different aspects to our product. Often when people think of Wolt, they think of only the consumer app. However, behind the scenes there’s a world of interesting, complex products to maintain and product problems to solve. We’re building so many cool things like our Wolt at Work that makes it easier for businesses to order food for events, on-demand delivery for businesses called Wolt Drive, our picker app which supports the picking and packing of items for those in charge of putting together Wolt orders or the app we’re building for our courier partners, just to mention a few. There are so many avenues through which you can have an impact and make Wolt better for our customers.
What’s been your favorite project here and why?
In the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time improving how store pages look and perform on Wolt. Retailers are different from restaurants, and one notable difference is the size and breadth of the selection they offer. I particularly enjoyed understanding the nuances of how we can best present and navigate this selection, and how decisions made then were foundational and would impact future experiences and problems to solve. Additionally, the team that worked on this project did a great job; each person’s skills and perspective brought something different to the table. The icing on the cake was how our work had tremendous impact both for the business and for our customers.
Example view of a retailer’s product selection on Wolt
What are the biggest challenges you face at work?
Definitely the pace. We move really fast as a company, which means that there are a lot of new information constantly. When we identify new opportunities out there, we don’t shy away from jumping onto them. Don’t get me wrong, we still stick to our bi-annual product roadmaps in general. But with the ever-changing market, fast growth, pace of the company and new learnings that come as we’re working on new business, there are often new opportunities to grab and pivots to be made on the go. So it can be a lot to keep up with at times. I also find it challenging to say no to opportunities we learn about, since we unfortunately can’t take on all opportunities at once.
Personally I really enjoy the fast growth. To me it feels like a career on a silver platter. It’s not easy and there are growing pains, but I’ve grown so much professionally during the past year and a half and I’m so excited to see what impact we can have in the upcoming years 🙌.
What’s been your biggest learning here? 💡
That it's fine to not always know an answer. Things change quickly and new things come at you fast here. I've learnt to be comfortable with the unknown. We're addressing challenges that are new and haven't been solved yet in the industry, which is what makes this role so exciting. There's a sense of camaraderie amongst the team, and we are all here to support each other.
I also have to say, I’ve never worked with such an inspiring group of colleagues before. The positive, can-do attitude is contagious and I feel like working with my colleagues makes me a better team member as well. I really feel like I can learn from every single one of my colleagues 💙.
What’s your favorite thing to order with Wolt?
We have these amazing vegan, gourmet donuts in Berlin called Brammibal’s 🍩 (big recommendation!). Oh and one of the best things is a nice 10pm late night Ben and Jerry’s order! They’re definitely my favorite treats to order 🥳.
