Merger managed.
Leading product design through the Just Eat × Takeaway.com merger: two design orgs, 22 markets, and one product thesis that outlasted me.
- Role
- Interim Head of Product Design
- Reported to
- TBD · who?
- Team
- 4 design managers + 2 principals + research TBD · total designers across both orgs?
- Budget / headcount
- TBD · what did you own?
- Scope
- Just Eat + Takeaway.com integration, 22 markets
- Duration
- 6 months
- Key peers
- TBD · Head of Product, market leads?
- 22Markets behind one product north star
- ?TBD · design teams unified: N teams, N people, in N months
- ?TBD · design staff retained through the integration: X% (company avg Y%)
Two companies, 22 markets, one product.
Just Eat and Takeaway.com had merged: two companies, two design orgs, two product cultures, one brand trying to behave like one product. I stepped in as interim Head of Product Design with a broad brief: "improve UX and drive growth".
My mandate was twofold: make two design teams work as one, and give them one product direction to work towards. TBD · what did the two design orgs look like when you started?
Food isn't the moat. Experience is.
Every player has food. What JET could own was the experience. One north-star metric everyone could agree on: orders delivered successfully.
Three pillars followed from the thesis: personalisation, omnichannel and design excellence.
What I chose, and what it cost.
| I chose | Over | Because |
|---|---|---|
| One shared north-star metric | Market-by-market KPIs | 22 markets needed one sentence to plan against |
| TBD · which pillar or market went first? | TBD · what got deprioritised? | TBD · … |
A strategy my managers owned before it shipped.
- People
Ran the strategy with four design managers and two principals so it was theirs, not mine.
TBD · how did you merge the two design teams: who led what, who stayed or left, how you decided?
- Org
Carved platform and accessibility teams out of existing capacity, a Voice-of-Customer program, and PIE as the cross-market design system.
- Upward
Made the bet legible to the business: one thesis, one metric, three pillars.
- Peers
TBD · how did product leadership take it up?
It survived the handoff.
The permanent Design Director took the same three pillars forward. UX maturity moved from level 2 to 3, PIE shipped with a dedicated team, and accessibility became a default.
TBD · one business metric that moved
What I'd do differently.
I'd lead with the product thesis and the business metric, and keep the frameworks backstage.
TBD · anything else, in your words