Creating teen advocacy in a challenger brand

Young people go absolutely mad for the latest crazes – so I worked with a small team to help this great challenger brand create even greater brand loyalty.

The Problem

Bubbleology are a challenger brand in the space of QSR (quick service restaurant) predominantly appealing to young people (teens) and the younger adult. They make bubble tea there and then and was the brainchild of Assad Khan – an investment banker with J P Morgan at the time.

Bubbleology had a whole host of devout advocates in their customers and they wanted to use that data prerogative to create a better marketing and advocacy tool. The problem was simply – how do you bring it all together?

The Solution

Working with the team at Appy Ventures, I was brought in to a project for high street QSR as product manager for the whole piece of work. The team was set-up in a slightly strange way – I was a remote product manager based in the UK, the design resource was based in Ukraine, and the developers based in India.

Some challenges at the early stage were predominantly technical – the EPOS system was in place and that only allowed for the proprietary loyalty system that they provided – whilst this also managed to ringfence the payments and thus caused more issues.

I outlined a solution around this that:

  • Allowed for integration in to the 3rd party systems using an API
  • Integrated payments using the stripe payment system
  • Linked up with the live stock systems to be able to allow people to create their ideal bubble tea (based on stock in store)
  • Allowed for prepayment, top-up (through a credit facility) and redemption (10th drink free)
  • Allowed to store loyalty “stamps” against the user account

As a part of this project I successfully delivered:

  • A full product backlog
  • Product wireframes (Application and EPOS system)
  • Product screen flow
  • Technical and functional requirements

Sadly progression on this project stopped due to mitigating circumstances.

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