A mobile app from 0 to 1

In the beginning, when we wanted to onboard clients we needed them to share the printed artwork of the products they wanted to detect, or we had to source and digitize the products ourselves through 3D reconstruction. We quickly found out this was unscalable — clients most of the time didn't have the artwork data, and we couldn't just buy every product to digitize it.

So we came up with the idea of a mobile app that would let clients onboard the products themselves. I mapped out the whole user journey, but we were limited by the technology available so I had to do a lot of testing and experimentation to find the right workflow that got us the data the way we needed it.

We worked with another company to build the app as we didn't have mobile development capabilities. I handled the communication with the contractors, the creation of requirements, the discussions around feasibility, and the alignment between our backend developers and the mobile developers.

I've worked on constant improvements of the app for over two years — direct communication with users, developers, and QAing the app myself. We've had more than 2,000 enterprise users onboard thousands of products. What used to take days of manual work now takes minutes or even seconds for a user in a supermarket. A single client has onboarded more than 5,000 products through their field force team alone. I've been part of every part of this — design, scale issues, decision making, training, QA.