After 8 years as CPO of Glovo, I have recently embarked on a well-deserved paternity leave to welcome the arrival of my second child, Olivia. This pause has allowed me to reflect upon Glovo’s journey and to discern the key elements that, in my belief, have propelled us to become the most successful consumer tech product to emerge from Southern Europe. For those who may not be familiar, Glovo is an Anything Delivery App operating in over 20 countries, serving millions of users and collaborating with tens of thousands of businesses and couriers.

In the long list of factors contributing to a company’s success, there exists an exhaustive list of variables, encompassing people, events, and strategies. My intention, however, is not to list them all. Instead, I want to call out the top five things which standout in my mind as instrumental in the success of the company.

Early definition of Core Values

The significance of well-defined core values often dawns on companies only when it’s too late. During the initial stages, explicit value statements may appear superfluous, as co-founders maintain direct, daily interactions with employees, and their values naturally permeate the organisation. However, as the company expands, a misguided belief can take hold that things will continue to operate as they did in the past. In reality, without clear values, individuals misaligned with the founders’ ethos infiltrate the organisation, perpetuating this misalignment in hiring practices, and so on. At a certain point, the executive team realises the challenges in steering the organization and endeavours to implement values — a formidable task at this point, given the deeply ingrained misaligned culture. At Glovo, our early executive team, commenced the process of defining clear values when our company had a headcount of approximately 20. This proactive step allowed us to scale our culture from the outset.

Additionally, our decision to restrict our core values to a concise set proved pivotal. While the temptation to adopt a plethora of values is enticing, we intentionally limited our set of values to a handful. I remember working as an intern in American Express (many years ago) and each morning when entering the building I would pass a long wall filled with posters of values such as Integrity, Team Work, Innovation, Think Big, Excellence, Respect, Excellence, Sustainability, Accountability, Customer Centricity, Empowerment, Quality, etc…when my internship finished after 4 months, I couldn’t recall many of them and certainly didn’t feel connected with them. Equally important, at Glovo, we exclusively selected values that were already inherent in our culture, reinforcing and amplifying existing strengths rather than inventing novel values that were not clearly present and hoping they would somehow take root.

This early alignment on values and the deliberate restriction to a compact set were instrumental in nurturing an exceptionally simple and aligned culture, which transcended borders scaling from Spain to Morocco to Kazakhstan. Arguably it’s the main reason people are drawn to and remain with Glovo is the culture.

Pioneering a differentiating and delightful Consumer Product

Glovo made its debut in 2015 in Spain, a market already teeming with mature food delivery services such as Just Eat, Deliveroo, and Take it Easy, all armed with substantial financial backing and a multi-year head start. Glovo’s core proposition, “anything delivered,” encompassing not only food but also groceries, flowers, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and more, was indeed disruptive. However, offering such a wide array of services necessitated the creation of a user experience that was not only user-friendly but also delightful (otherwise users would resort to using several vertical specific solutions). While numerous factors contribute to the contentment of Glovo’s customers — such as delivery speed, assortment, pricing, and customer service — the app’s user experience has consistently stood out as a differentiator, setting the Glovo brand apart from the competition. We made substantial early investments in this aspect, and this commitment continues to drive our efforts today. Glovo has a distinctive essence, a unique “soul.”

A Steadfast Marketing Playbook

In the realm of customer acquisition, myriad strategies abound, especially in our case, where we operate in diverse markets, each with its own peculiarities (“our country is different”). However, at Glovo, we have adhered to a solid and, perhaps more significantly, consistent marketing strategy for nearly a decade which has resisted the allure of deviating strategies, such as promotional battles with competitors.

Our strategy hinges on harnessing traditional media, particularly television (and youtube), which has expansive reach, to disseminate awareness of Glovo’s value proposition, “Anything Delivered” along with online performance marketing to convert users. The key of this approach is consistency, which has enabled Glovo to cultivate a robust and irreplicable brand identity. Credit for this enduring strategy goes to Alex Menal, Glovo’s talented CMO.

Finding ‘the’ traction channel

For a startup, once it identifies its product-market fit, the next formidable challenge is finding effective traction channels to acquire new customers. Companies typically have several traction channels at their disposal, but the most coveted ones are those that are simultaneously cost-effective (with low customer acquisition costs) and expansive (capable of reaching a large user base). Often, traction channels are either expensive yet extensive (as with large-scale ad campaigns) or economical yet constrained (such as word-of-mouth referrals). Several years ago, when Glovo was a fledgling startup operating solely in four Spanish cities, we received news that McDonald’s was venturing into the delivery domain. Our entire executive team undertook a monumental effort to secure this account. One of our distinguishing propositions was our commitment to tailor our product to McDonald’s needs. We gave them priority in our dispatching logistics, early access to UI enhancements in our consumer app, and the distinction of becoming our first partner integrated directly into our backend. McDonald’s ultimately selected three global delivery partners, with Glovo being the smallest one by far. For us, this collaboration represented the pinnacle — a colossal, worldwide traction channel with virtually no customer acquisition costs.

Implementing a performance culture

Ensuring the presence of top-tier talent throughout the organisation is absolutely essential. Whether it’s in product development, engineering, design, operations, or sales, the focus must always be on recruiting the best individuals. However, this is just one side of the coin, the other, less emotionally pleasant side of the coin involves the creation, execution, and expansion of a performance-driven culture.

This entails the establishment of clear goals for both teams and individuals, rigorous performance measurement, and, when performance falls below the desired standard, taking action in the most considerate manner possible.

Glovo, like many startups, did not initially possess a performance-centric culture. The spark that ignited this transformation came from an early hire named Pooja Thakrar. As she assumed different roles within Glovo, she decisively addressed underperformers en masse and brought in new talent. As time passed, the entire executive team drew inspiration from the principles outlined in “No Rules Rules” and incorporated key lessons into the very essence of Glovo’s culture. I like to think of Glovo as an unstoppable bullet train, with every member of the team having an eventual destination stop.

If you’ve reached this point, you might be wondering, “Is that all?” The answer is, of course, “no.” What I’ve shared here is just a select few of the aspects that stand out in my mind. I am quite certain that one could compose an entire book chronicling the history of Glovo, encompassing all the various areas and individuals that contributed to its success along the way. This would include details about secured investments and fundraising rounds, the valuable contributions of couriers and partners, the important work of product teams in developing fundamental components of logistics, fintech, and partner technology, the relentless sales teams that outperformed competitors, the scaling of customer service across the globe, and of course the local teams which run the day to day businesses. However, I’ll wait until AI technology evolves to the point where it can access the full email history of a company, conduct 1000 parallel video employee interviews and write a book in one go :)

On our journey to making great products, we make a million decisions each and every day (okay, maybe not a million). Decisions that impact how the product functions, looks and feels, as well as how it scales. But these decisions aren’t made in isolation. They’re all considered and made within the larger context of the company’s future and the “big picture” of what the product should be and what it should eventually become.

To help build the product management team to make these tradeoffs, a set of product principles is needed.

What are the Product Principles?

Product Principles are a way of encoding successes, helping to guide product managers to repeat the previous behaviours that led to positive outcomes in the past and avoid the behaviours that led to mistakes. Think of them as directions, showing you how we got here and, more importantly, how to navigate the road ahead.

We drafted the very first version of our product principles upon entering our second year of operation and while hiring our first product managers. Now, five years into our journey, our business has matured and grown orders of magnitude. Now that our product team is 30+ strong, we have gone back to revise our principles: a couple of them no longer apply, a few remain very strong and relevant and only needed some minor tweaking, and we also added a couple of new ones now that our product development organisation has matured.

Below, you can see the latest version of our product principles:

Building from a Blank Canvas

The best thing to do when trying to understand an opportunity or get to the root of the problem is to ask “why”. You don’t want to copy or assume that the solution already exists. It’s important to be creative and inventive and to find organic solutions to the challenges you and your team face. It’s unique products that differentiate stand-out companies from their generic competitors in crowded marketplaces — so start with a blank canvas and innovate!

Maximise Simplicity

At Glovo, our core value proposition is taking a complex concept — like getting anything to anyone at any time — and putting it into an accessible user-friendly package for our users. Less is often more when it comes to accessibility, so favour simplicity over complexity. Deprecate the features that don’t bring value, and look to remove any unnecessary complexity from those that do — every element of the UI represents a chance to simplify our product.

Simplicity may be our overriding principle, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of those subtle surprises and touches of warmth that users have come to know and love about Glovo. We take that into everything we do and it’s part of our essence as a brand.

Take a Holistic Approach

Take into account the 360-degree impact that product changes will have on customers, couriers and partners, as well as support agents. What we do is start small so that we can ensure that we efficiently obtain the maximum value without imposing negative downstream impact on stakeholders.

Building impactful, well-rounded solutions should include close alignment and coordination between business, product, design, data and engineering, so develop strong relationships with colleagues throughout the business and welcome input from other teams. Don’t think, work or build in isolation.

Measure from Day One

Implement new features that start gathering data from the moment they’re launched. A/B test to understand the impact. Data missed is a lesson lost, and it’s difficult to make future product decisions if key data elements cannot be measured.

Instrument products to make them measurable from the outset, so you can learn from mistakes, act on insights, and be able to explain how any feature you own is behaving from a data perspective.

Glovo’s Product Principles was originally published in The Glovo Tech Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.