In Part 2 of this episode, Matt Ring takes us inside Deliveroo’s nine‑country operation and its multi‑billion‑pound marketplace. He unpacks how seemingly small product changes, like Rider Check‑in, drive customer experience, loyalty, and margin in a tight unit economics model. Matt then digs into building a global GTM calendar around local commercial priorities, how to hold a core narrative while flexing 30% for regional nuance, and where AI is genuinely helping with content consistency and coaching.

Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast.

In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights and hearing from other industry leaders

to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business.

You are listening to part two of our conversation.

Before we go into more questions, I think you going,

I just, for the audience, I just wanna give a concept and then get a

bit deeper on Deliveroo if we can.

Cause if we use that as an anchor for some of these conversations, and it's important

to think about you, Matt, as an individual that how are you going to apply these

tools and frameworks that you've learned in the organizations moving forward?

But just, give a concept of Deliveroo, how many countries are you in?

So Deliveroo is currently in nine countries.

Okay.

And when you think about that, like what, is the, concept,

how big, how much revenue...

Yeah, absolutely.

So Deliveroo, currently generates over 2 billion in terms of total transactions.

And so what that means is the collection of the, menu item cost, and then

the fees that our platform charges.

So as a customer, you might pay 15 pounds for your pizza, and

then you might pay some fees for us to deliver it to you as well.

And riders, have I got the right term?

Correct, riders.

How did you say?

How many?

Sorry?

I didn't say how many.

That's a good question.

Okay.

Sorry.

That's an unfair question.

Thousands, tens of thousands.

Yeah.

Good answer.

Good answer.

I don't think it was the scale, right?

I thought you were gonna start asking, can

you name them individually?

And, just for context, Deliveroo was recently

acquired by DoorDash, which is a large American delivery firm.

And they also own another delivery firm called Wolt, who operate in,

Europe, and further east as well.

And I suppose when you think about that's, big scale, isn't it,

to do some go to market transformation.

So what if we de described what go to market transformation looks and

looks like at delivery, like Yeah.

How, does it function day in, day out?

Yeah.

Okay.

So what we do is we take, we've already talked about the t-shirt

sizing and for, as a reminder, that's about the size of the change and

the number of people that are, are required to be told about the change.

But what we do first is we basically have a big input funnel.

So we have a request form effectively, which allows all, subject matter experts

across the business, whether they're on the rider's side, the consumer side,

the product of marketing side, to tell us what are they gonna launch when.

We look at the six month horizon and we look at the sort of

the next three month horizon.

So we take all of that in and we overlay our t-shirt sizing framework to that.

and then what that gives us is a, big list.

A lot of things that, are likely to change and what are gonna come.

And just give us an example.

I know you've going to cover...

So for example, we've got, it's a product called Rider Check-in.

Okay.

So this is, when a rider goes into a restaurant and they have to physically

say, I am here at the restaurant and what that does is it gives us a really

strong signal that they have arrived.

When they said they were gonna arrive, when we thought they were

gonna arrive, and when we told the restaurant that they were gonna arrive.

And so we use that data to basically make sure that we're optimizing the journey

time from the restaurant to the customer.

Stupid question time.

Why?

Why do that?

Because I, get it, but what's the so what?

So the so what is when you are at home and you order your pizza.

And we tell you it's gonna come in 20 minutes.

It comes in 20 minutes.

So customer loyalty?

It is customer experience, which drives, repeat

purchase, which drives retention.

Yeah.

And how does revenue generated in Deliveroo?

So revenue is generated through the commission that we take off each

order, and some, transaction fees that we, collect from the customers as well.

We obviously have to pay the riders as well.

So it's it's a very, tightly optimized business model.

Yeah.

You imagine margins are tight, right?

So every marginal gain.

Yeah.

Do you have any, actually, I'm curious about this because I,

believe in the slight edge, the marginal gain theory, when you're

in such tight margin environments.

Yeah.

did you ever deploy any of that sort of marginal gain philosophy?

Absolutely.

One of Deliveroo's values, is and remains, we obsess about operational excellence.

That is really the core of why that is value.

Yeah.

So it's all about finding those marginal gains.

In the example I used previously, what sounds quite innocuous, a rider telling

us that they're at the restaurant is actually incredibly powerful because we

can then marginally optimize the, time when we tell the rider to get there

or wait to get there or decide which rider to send there and when we tell

the restaurant to prepare the food.

And that changes depending on peak hours.

Rider numbers, all of that kind of stuff.

Customer demand.

And I suppose if there was a, if there's like a 30 second

lag of when they've told it's gonna come and it doesn't come 30 seconds

depending on the lag of the time, then that's where customer retention,

Yeah

and churn...

Absolutely and that's where you get really annoyed because

your pizza is 15 minutes late and

it's cold

Potentially.

Sorry, I'm going down a right rabbit...

I'm thinking you're gonna be ordering yourself a pizza in a minute.

I'm gonna go become a rider.

When you were just talking about like operational efficiency.

I'm intrigued to hear what did you, what was that one, whether it was an initiative

or, a deployment of a go to market motion.

What was, what one really excited you the most?

So whether it's because, it achieved a significant outcome, but what sort of

initiatives while you are there, while you were there, did you think, yes.

I feel, I want to put my hat on this one.

This was a good one.

Yeah.

I think, I'm gonna, I'm gonna continue to talk about the example that I have, we've

talked about, which is the Rider Check-in.

And, this was a, massive global priority, for the business and, it's really

difficult to organize and, prepare frontline teams in multiple markets to

be ready for something which is, seems relatively innocuous, but actually

requires a large amount of change from all three sides of the marketplace.

So the frontline team, the restaurant, and the riders as well.

And so this was done, six to nine months ago but the good thing about it was

that it was, it was a demonstration of all of the constituent parts of

our model working exceptionally well.

Really good planning upfront, alignment on goals, which

laddered up to the company goals.

Preparation for different segments within the business as well.

So that's something that I think in the early days we forgot about,

because we just couldn't scale it.

But with a massive change like that, we've now got to a point where when we

need to, we're getting under the skin of, okay, if I am, someone who thinks

about how's a portfolio of 400 clients.

What's my interaction versus someone who looks after one large enterprise client?

And that's very common in all businesses, right?

But being able to prepare those teams and those partners effectively,

and do that at scale across nine markets was, I'm very, proud of that.

And the adoption of that product has continued to grow, exceptionally

well because of the way that we prepared and delivered that change.

I love that.

Even just the whole alignment piece.

It sounds so simple, but you get the alignment wrong.

Yeah.

And just to, tap on the back of that, where you, let's just

focus on this, you said nine markets?

Yeah.

This global, global team that sounds like it's.

Pretty robust in terms of operations.

When you look at the global consistency, okay, we've got this go to market motion.

This is what it looks like globally.

Yeah.

When do you decide that you need to change

it for regional nuances?

Yeah and that's, I think that's, my experience of

being, in the frontline role.

I felt this acutely, right?

And I think we've all felt that you're looking after an account

or a set of accounts and you get something from Central and it's

just doesn't, it's not gonna land.

it's not gonna land.

So you go and change it and you, before you know it, everyone's

created their own thing.

So it's really hard problem to solve.

The way that we think about that is what's the core narrative,

that everyone needs to understand.

Start with that before everything else.

Work really closely with the product manager or product SME or whoever's

owning the, thing that we're changing and make sure that we're really, clear

upfront about what the narrative is.

And I think you can use this in any, situation actually.

If you've got a team and you're trying to help 'em to refine their pitch,

everybody should say the same core 30 second, three minute, 30 minute pitch.

That's how I was taught, if you like.

And that's something that I always, stick with.

So we, start with the narrative.

And then through a combination of, structured interactions with the

different markets, champion sessions, feedback, we get under the skin of

what's happening in those markets.

How is this gonna land?

Is it, how relevant is it?

Do you have anything else that's going on that's gonna influence it?

and typically I think like most things, 70% of it is the same and 30% requires

a bit of change, A bit of, nuance.

And that's typically how we've approached things, and again, it's

been a lot of trial and error.

Yeah.

I love that core narrative piece.

It's, missed in so many places, but just describe like what that is.

I think, I know.

I'd love you just to paint a bit more color in that.

Yeah, sure.

So in simple terms, that's really saying, what is it that we are talking about here?

What's the, what, is the thing?

What's in it for the end user?

And why should they care?

It's pure change management.

It really is.

It's this is the North Star in any environment.

Yeah.

So we, need to change this because, and this is the WIIFM, what's in it

for you and how many organizations forget that when they're doing

change in go to market motions?

Just too many.

I think.

I think when you look at the, so the other, when

I said about regional nuances, I think the part that you forget is

that people in different areas.

So if you wanna get that adoption, you have to make it feel like

it's being done for them.

And I know a lot of organizations, we used very typical frameworks.

Again, you say like the 70, 30, 70 is gonna stay the same 30 we're gonna change.

Yeah.

And I think that 30 makes a really big difference in terms of

how it lands, as you mentioned.

And then the success in region.

Yeah, absolutely.

You feel it's tailored.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

The other thing that we've found that works is if we go back

to our kind of, our framework.

So once we've gathered all of the inputs about what the change, what changes

is, planned, we basically build a calendar of what's coming up and what

we found works really well is if we insert that calendar around distinct

commercial, local, commercial priorities because those can't change, right?

If your local head of sales needs to deliver something over the

next two months, that is going to happen and it's really important.

The same with your local marketing.

Those things can't be changed.

So we fit the other kind of global pieces around that.

And again, that drives really good buy-in from local market leadership

and teams because it, doesn't clash.

It sits together.

So that's really helped us, but we, found that out later on, I think.

And I wouldn't be the queen of AI if I didn't

ask this question, would I?

How are you utilizing AI within Deliveroo currently?

Good, the bad and the ugly please.

So, we use AI in a number of different ways.

In my area or my previous area where, we were creating a lot of

content, we had a number of tools to effectively ensure that our narrative

and the way that we were building our collateral was uniform, and consistent.

So AI made that really, simple.

A series of prompts, some frameworks that we have that we've developed.

Those go into it and make sure that every piece of content we're

creating looks and feels the same.

We also, have started to use, use AI in terms of coaching.

So following off the back of, in-person training courses, using tools to help

people, practice their skills, basically.

Is that AI coaching?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And how's that been adopted with?

It's been, it is been okay I think the, as I, if I go back to my,

time as a, an individual account person, I think the reality is that lots of

people are using lots of tools themselves to adapt to what's given to them.

And that's a really hard problem to solve.

And I think there's good 'cause it's creativity, but also it does mean in

central roles where you're trying to create consistent narrative that's hard.

Yeah.

And it's difficult for us to, I hate to use the word control, but

effectively it's difficult to have oversight of what's happening.

So we try and use it in those scenarios where there's training.

I think it's had mixed responses.

Some people really like the fact that they have to, for example,

upload a video and get it rated.

Other people really, don't like that.

And we have found that if we don't tell people up front that's happening, we get

a huge drop off from the training because all of a sudden it feels very scary.

Whilst AI might be cool, the thing that they're being asked to do is record

themselves, and they don't like that.

Yeah.

So that's again, about good communication upfront, which

we have, we missed a few times.

And that's a really good, lesson learned as well.

Isn't it?

Just hearing things that, this, again, going back to the simple

thing, that communication as part, as a part of any rollout.

Yeah.

Something so simple can cause really big pushback.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's the end of part two.

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Goodbye.