Making Just Eat 'available to customers wherever they are on any device' - an interview with CTO Carlos Morgado

Apple Watch, cloud and analytics are refining food ordering at Just Eat, providing a personal experience to customers, wherever they are, Morgado tells Computing

Just Eat aims to completely change the way people order takeaway food by providing a single point of online service that users can visit to order food from local outlets.

Originally founded as just a website, Just Eat has rapidly evolved to meet changing customer demands, especially as a result of the smartphone boom with its app now the most common method for food orders.

"The mobile experience in the UK takes roughly 60 per cent of the order volume. It's been a journey of learning that's driven by measuring what the users wanted, as well as talking to them to make sure we're on the right track," Carlos Morgado, group chief technology officer at Just Eat, told Computing.

That, he explained in an interview at the recent Open Mobile Summit, means Just Eat is constantly examining which new technologies could benefit customers. It's why the company launched a specifically designed app to coincide with the launch of the Apple Watch - and it's an area Just Eat sees strong potential in.

"If you think about a wearable device, it's always on your wrist and does play strongly into the takeaway ordering experience," said Morgado. "It's a device that is able to interact with you continuously, to tell you about the status of your order," he continued, before going on to provide an example of when Just Eat for Apple Watch would be useful.

"If you happen to have ordered from a restaurant a mile away and you're going to collect you're food, we could get you to that restaurant by giving you directions on your wrist rather than having to take your mobile phone out. For those reasons I think it fits well," he explained.

Morgado described the work with Apple Watch as "exploratory" but noted how this forms a significant area of investigation for the company. "It's important to explore to understand the value of this experience to the consumer and to see whether its theatre or its real," he said.

Apple recently announced that its Apple Pay contactless payment service will be available in the UK from this month and Morgado revealed how Just Eat is already looking into using this "commercially very interesting" technology.

"If you think about transaction fees for card not present transactions - which is obviously what one would do via a credit card on our website or existing apps - with Apple Pay we overcome that. That could be financially very attractive for us," he said.

Ultimately, Morgado explained, Just Eat can only provide the best service possible when it is "available to the customer wherever they might be on whatever device they have".

"We're definitely exploring experiences that are alternative to the existing journey as well as experiences where the user interacts via a different device - not the ones out there already," he added.

Given the close relationship Just Eat has with its customers, data analysis plays an important role in tailoring the best possible experience. That's why Just Eat uses an Amazon RedShift data warehouse, and has a specifically created business insight team in order to find out how it can perform better.

"We're constantly analysing the user experiences; what's their journey to becoming frequent users? Or why do some people come to the website then never interact with it again," Morgado explained.

"These guys are constantly looking at what looks good at the moment, what are the strong experiences the consumers are having, what are the ones that could change and what are the ones which are not working at all," he said.

The outsourcing of a data centre to Amazon fits with Just Eat's cloud first strategy, which enables the company to focus on innovation rather than maintaining infrastructure.

Not only is it a "major cost saving" innovation, but it enables organisations to focus on applications and services, rather than hardware. "Be it on-site, off-site, tin that goes out of date or the huge amount of software licences associated with those big traditional data warehouses," Morgado said.

That has aided Just Eat in quickly developing and updating its mobile offerings. Morgado told Computing that he believes the smartphone, in particular, has empowered customers.

"The smartphone is interesting. We used to call a big, room-sized machine a PC, but look at a smartphone, isn't this what a personal computer is truly supposed to be?

"It's near me, it's inside my pocket, and it knows me intimately. It knows my context, where I am, it knows my health, appointments, everything about me and therefore is a great way of providing decision-making empowerment to the user," he explained.

However, that doesn't mean that Just Eat is going all in for mobile and the company will continue to develop applications for computers. There are some people who will continue to use a laptop, who will want to use their TV, said Morgado.

Power to the people

Just Eat's main aim is to "empower consumers wherever they are, whatever context they're in and on whatever device they have available", said Morgado, who described how that means the company is "not going to focus on a particular device".

"You don't get hungry just when you're at home, you get hungry at any time and we want to empower the consumer to place an order wherever they may be at their convenience," he added.

It is Just Eat's cloud infrastructure that enables it to cope at busy times, such as Saturday nights when there's a not-unexpected rush for takeaways. Morgado described it as "absolutely invaluable in managing the peaky traffic we have in our business" because "being on cloud means we can scale up very quickly and cost effectively in those times".

Just Eat was a relatively early adopter of cloud infrastructure and Morgado told Computing how "it is necessary to embrace the opportunities that technology gives us as and when they arise. I think we did it with cloud; now we're exploring wearables and new payment technologies".

For Morgado, keeping pace with the latest technological developments is "required in today's world where technology is pervasive, where people are able to interact with new services and opportunities with a range of devices they have on their person".

"So I think a company such as ours has to probe and test and learn as it goes along to determine which ones are valuable conduits for food ordering and which ones are not," he added.

While technology may alter the methods in which Just Eat provides services, there's one thing that never changes; the fact that the online takeaway ordering service must be online and operational at all times, because even if systems are down for just a second, business will be lost.

"When I get the call on Saturday at midnight, it's my responsibility," Morgado said of potential system failures. That's why Just Eat is altering how its team of 150 engineers - responsible for services in 14 countries - go about providing support in what he described as "the next step forward".

"We'll have an operations team that will be present 24/7. There will be at least one engineer who is highly experienced, has dealt with situations in the past and can hopefully prevent an incident occurring at all. But if it does, [at least] prevent the event from affecting the consumer," said Morgado.

"Because ultimately that's what it's about, the numbers of orders that we generate per minute are so high that every minute we can shave off from any incident resolution is highly valuable," he concluded.