All of our work is guided by our mission to reduce waste — especially food waste — in homes and local communities. We also aim to live our company values of being inclusive, resourceful, caring and ambitious in everything we do.
When prioritising work, we consider a wide range of factors, including:
The potential impact on reducing waste
Maintaining the health of the marketplace so the model continues to work effectively, including:
retention of existing users & volunteers
acquisition and conversion of new users & volunteers
the number of listings/items added to the app
pickup arranged rates
Food Waste Hero collection slot coverage and site compliance
Generating new revenue, or protecting existing revenue, to ensure Olio remains financially viable
Feedback from our community, including:
monthly CSAT (customer satisfaction) surveys
ad hoc surveys
forum discussions
customer support feedback
Feedback and requirements from our business partners and clients, including time-sensitive rollouts that are often driven by client timelines rather than our own
Opportunities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of internal teams
The complexity of the work involved
The level of risk associated with a change, including technical, community, brand and revenue risk
It’s also important to understand that:
Olio has many different teams, including engineering, marketing, analytics, legal, design, sales, customer support, finance and HR. Team members have specialist skill sets, which means, for example, that the marketing team cannot work on app or Volunteer Hub fixes.
Some changes that appear complicated may actually be quick to implement (often visual/UI updates), while some things that seem simple can be highly complex behind the scenes (for example Food Waste Hero policy changes or preventing misuse/bad actor behaviour)
We are managing multiple workstreams at the same time, and different types of work require different specialist teams. For example, at times we may have more frontend engineering capacity than backend engineering capacity, which can affect the order in which work is delivered.
Some improvements also depend on foundational technical or operational work happening first, even if that work is largely invisible to the community.
Working on multiple things in the same area at once often slows everyone down — for example, if several changes are being made to the same policy, codebase area, or process, they can conflict with each other, create rework, or force one piece of work to wait on another.
This is why you'll sometimes see us progressing very different types of work in parallel: for example, while we're tackling something complex like bad actor prevention, we might at the same time be making visual updates to the forum. Spreading work across different areas means more gets delivered overall and faster in the long run, even if it can look like attention is being split.
All the above means that sometimes a change that matters a lot to an individual user/small group of users may not be the highest priority for the wider health, sustainability and impact of the platform.
Please be assured we put significant thought and analysis into what we prioritise, balancing a wide range of visible and behind-the-scenes considerations.
We know it can be frustrating when the change you most want isn’t the next thing delivered, but every decision is made with the long-term health, impact and sustainability of the Olio community in mind.
Thank you for your understanding and continued support.