With tech companies such as Grab, we are always curious about how they are doing things behind the scenes–including how they develop products and features on their platform. This is why e27 reached out to Prashant Kumar, Head of Product, Fulfilment at Grab, to understand how they do it.

“Our tech priorities are similarly guided by our promise to our users as well as business needs to drive sustainable growth. For example, with a trying macro outlook, our consumers are now looking for more affordable options to meet their everyday needs,” Kumar explains in an email.

“This has prompted us to work on features that enable us to offer more affordable services such as saver delivery and GrabShare to our consumers – while making sure our driver and delivery partners continue to earn sustainably, and the platform remains relevant.”

The product lead shares the important milestones that these products have made to help increase drivers’ productivity: In 2022, Grab saw an estimated 3.55 per cent reduction in average idle time for driver-partners compared to 2021. The company also saw its driver-partners average earnings per online hour increase by 10 per cent in 2022 compared to the previous year.

In developing these products, Grab goes by the principle that its driver- and delivery partners have different needs: Some may like more guidance than others, while others may prefer to drive or deliver orders within a specific area. The majority of them prefer to be on Auto-Accept mode, while its Shared Fleet initiative also gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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“In 2022, we saw 71 per cent of our two-wheel driver-partners taking on both delivery and transport bookings. By leveraging the multiple everyday services that Grab provides to consumers, our partners can choose to take on different types of bookings to maximise their time online and increase their earning opportunities,” Kumar says.

What fulfilment is all about

Before understanding the process behind the development of products that can help driver-partners with their productivity, Kumar begins by explaining the role that the fulfilment team plays in users’ journeys.

According to him, the fulfilment team gets into action after consumers press the ‘book’ or ‘place order’ button on our app. It is made up of about 200 people, consisting of product managers, engineers, UX designers, researchers, data analysts and scientists.

“We use tech at scale to meet consumers’ requests. The steps to fulfil these requests include finding the best driver-partner and consumer match when consumers book a ride or finding the most efficient way to deliver consumers’ food or grocery orders,” he says.

“A big part of the work done by the team is to leverage Grab’s scale and ecosystem to drive more efficiency and productivity for our driver- and delivery partners. Helping them to earn more sustainably while ensuring we remain a reliable service to our consumers and lower our cost to serve.”

The team also drives hundreds of optimisations every month on existing features so that it can continuously improve based on user feedback.

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Kumar further explains that Grab’s product development process starts with identifying the right problem statement to solve. This is led by product managers who work cross-functionally and examine internal data, user feedback, and business needs.

Once the problem statement is confirmed, the product managers will discuss and build solutions for it with the team of engineers and designers.

“This process could involve more research as our team runs a variety of user studies to identify insights for the team to explore further. These include conducting fundamental research to identify new opportunities, holding in-depth interviews and shadowing driver- or delivery-partners while they are completing bookings,” Kumar says.

“When we have a list of potential solutions, our team of researchers would also conduct concept tests for the different solutions, while our data analysts and scientists will look into related data to infer insights and performance data of the solutions. Finally, usability tests will be done to ensure the user journey is intuitive before a new feature is rolled out.”

Once the first version of the solutions is built, Grab will invite driver- and delivery partners to test it in real-life situations, moving into a co-creation phase that further refines the products based on user feedback.

“It is also during such pilots that we will discover most of the bugs related to the new product features and will fix those bugs immediately. This is a closed-loop process. We will repeat the process until both our partners who are participating in the pilots, and we are confident of the solution before it will be rolled out to all users.”

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Grab updates driver-partners on new features via in-app messages and EDMs. Its Grab Support team is also regularly trained to help guide our driver-partners to use the features effectively or answer any questions.

Exploring new territory

Even with all that Grab has managed to achieve, there are still many areas of innovation that the company wants to explore. Kumar shares a handy list of them.

“In Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia, we are running an ongoing pilot for a Ride Guide feature. This feature is built to provide driver-partners with a fully automated guided experience that brings them to the nearest areas with high ride demand throughout the time they are online on the Grab platform. This maximises driver-partners’ chances of securing bookings automatically,” he explains.

Grab is also developing an Optimised Airport Queue Experience to help partners better address the increasing traffic from airports as tourism recovers in the region.

“Today, our driver-partners are only able to find out their queue position and waiting time through an in-app notification when they enter the queue at airports in Singapore, Bangkok, Jakarta, Vietnam and more. They get an update every 5-10 queue positions and have no way to find out the status of the queue in real time. This is not a productive use of their time if the queues are slow to move,” Kumar says.

“We hope to change this experience with the new feature that will enable driver-partners to see their position in the queue and estimated waiting time in real-time. It will empower them to make informed decisions on whether to continue waiting in the queue or leave and take on bookings elsewhere. We expect to roll out this feature before the end of the year.”

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Image Credit: Grab

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