The years I lived with Snapp — Part One: SnappTrip

15 min readJan 29, 2022

In this article, I am going to take you on a journey through the path that I have set off with Snapp Group since 2017. I will share memories with you, both good and bad, about everything that I have learned, as well as the challenges, successes, and progresses the group and I have dealt with and achieved. To put it in a nutshell, I have started my cooperation with Snapp Group at Pintapin company (current SnappTrip) and as Head of Product Design. Later, I expanded my cooperation and started working with other ventures based on the micro and macro strategies of the group. This cooperation continued even up until the date of publishing this article.

First, I was going to share the story of these years as a single post, yet I realized that my direct presence in each of Snapp ventures such as SnappTrip, Snapp (ride-hailing), and finally, the Snapp Super Application were each a long worth telling. The stories that I wished to share with you in full detail. After writing the initial draft, I took my final decision to publish this story as two or more articles. In this article you are reading at this moment, I will tell you about the turning points of my presence, projects, friends, and colleagues in SnappTrip. The next article(s) entail(s) the stories of my work in other parts of Snapp Group.

The onset of my cooperation with SnappTrip

After attending several stages of the interview with the product team, senior managers, and the CEO of the company (finally in the Winter, i.e. March 2017) I was recruited by the SnappTrip company as Head of Product Design.

The start of my cooperation coincided with the change of the CEO, and as a result, updating the strategies of the company. In the early days of my work in the complex, my direct manager, Amir Azimi, was Head of Product. A manager that soon became one of my best friends.

For the first time ever in my career life, I was working with many people who were graduated from universities outside Iran or non-Iranians. Back then, I was thrilled to see the professional processes, profound knowledge of my colleagues, projects, and the great perspective of SnappTrip.

Unfortunately, my cooperation with Amir did not last very long. Only a few months after I started working at SnappTrip, Amir left the company. Afterward, my direct manager at SnappTrip was Mark, the CEO of the company.

The direct cooperation with the CEO of the company from the very first day until Mark’s and my last days at the company, helped the process of design to be regarded as an important part of work and resulted in including design in the macro decisions of the company. Now, when I look back, I consider this as one of the turning points of my cooperation with SnappTrip.

What were SnappTrip’s plans back then?

Before discussing the objectives and perspective of SnappTrip during those years, first let me say that back then, the ventures of Snapp Group were less than half of the current companies.

SnappTrip was regarded as one of the special ventures of the Group. This special view of the Group was due to the fact that providing tourism and travel services in every aspect was one of the most unique areas to grow. At that point in time, millions of users were struggling to book hotels, flight tickets, etc. offline and through travel agencies. Agencies who were not easy to reach and did not have transparent pricing policies and the users were only offered a few options in the process of selection.

I remember that during the first days of my work, the company was facing these types of challenges.

At that time, we merely rendered the hotel booking services. We were the greatest online service in that area. However, we were trying to enter new markets such as booking flight tickets in the shortest time possible.
Our quantitative data were not clean. During those days Marziyeh, Head of Data, and her team were trying to improve the required data infrastructure for decision-making, add new structure and tools to the data, and build a data warehouse.
We were dealing with several problems concerning the product development processes, and the relationship between our tech, product, and design teams. These problems cost a lot of time and energy and kept us away from our attaining ideals.
On account of expanding the company in a short period of time, some of the main internal processes and our back-office were unable to operate properly.
Despite SnappTrip’s organizational clients and numerous B2B relationships, it did not provide a centralized solution for these segments. The requests of these companies and organizations were registered through the B2C product or via Excel spreadsheets.

What was my role and my Response to these challenges?

Flight ticket service

First, I was appointed to the position of directing the design team for SnappTrip’s new product, i.e. “Flight ticket”. This was SnappTrip’s first and maybe the foremost step towards emerging as a service provider to render these services to its clients to enable them to provide all they needed for a trip from one service provider.

To set the motion, the members of the product design, tech, and product management teams started cooperating and evaluating the domestic and foreign products in the field of flight booking. We aimed at releasing an MVP of this product in a short span of time and taking into account the progress of our competitors.

One of our ideation sessions with tech, product and design teams.

The following were the most crucial challenges we faced during this process:

Lack of appropriate design infrastructure at SnappTrip. When I joined SnappTrip, the design files had no specific source and its design system had not been developed yet.
Due to the novelty of this business line, we had no access to quantitative data and had to rely on the qualitative data we collected during the process of design.
The company had neither sufficient human resources nor a cross-functional structure, thus, the designers and developers had to work on the projects for hotels and flights at the same time.

Eventually, despite all ups and downs in the path of developing this product, within several months we all celebrated the first flight ticket sales together in the company.

The important point in the process of development of this product was my endeavors to have the client-side data analysis tools such as Tag Manager, GA, and Hotjar implemented on this service, and on the other hand, the data team, product management, and the tech teams tried to log all states of booking process such that we can have them as a detailed dashboard.

Collecting these data and considering the data monitoring tools during my presence in SnappTrip helped us to design more data-driven and it enabled us to provide our customers with a better user experience.

Process of data-driven design

As I stated earlier, developing the flight ticket service helped us to move towards data-driven design in the process of product development. However, it was not the whole story.

With the cooperation of the data team, as well as Mark and Marziyeh’s support we started using a tool called Domo. Domo was a BI tool that enabled all people to have immediate and easy access to all data available in the company.

These data were numbers that were collected through a variety of sources such as GA, Database, customer service portal, etc. and it gave us the opportunity to write and analyze queries per project and scenario.

Domo’s raw data was increasing little by little. Now we were able to find the answer to the majority of our questions in no time. For instance, we could investigate the behavior of our users regarding any service that they were using.

This behavior tracking not only included hotel and flight booking services, but also enabled us to analyze the internal data of the company such as the behavior of the call center team and customer service, plus advance towards optimizing the panels used by these teams.

In the end, I should add that one of the projects that I carried out at SnappTrip was creating dashboards in Domo for design and product management teams. These dashboards helped us to have immediate access to the most crucial behavioral data of our users.

For instance, we were able to use these dashboards and check all Funnels of the products. We could easily access users’ information for our further behavioral analysis or our evaluation plans, plus we could segment them or invite candidates to our test sessions.

Restructuring teams

During the SnappTrip strategy development sessions, we figured out our perspective to add more services. The addition of these services was impossible without several changes in the structure of our teams.

We started identifying our current problems by studying the leading international businesses and inviting consultants and Agile Coaches such as Sara Rabiei from Spotify. Then, suggested the cross-functional structure for the future of the company.

My role in this process was divided into several parts:

To expand the design team bearing in mind the Vision, Roadmaps, and Backlog of the respective products. Restructure the team as well as the internal and inter-department processes in regard to the enlargement of the company. It consisted of assigning one or more designers, UX writers, UX researchers [considering the complexity of the product and the number of developers and product managers] to each cross-functional team.
To assign a designer with a service design background, and design the internal dashboards and processes with her cooperation to improve the back-office processes and dashboards.
To define the qualitative and quantitative data structure, plus the documentation process to each of these cross-functional teams, and supply the data dashboards with respect to the needs of each team and with the cooperation of the data and product teams.
To define the strategy of the design team infrastructure, and to assign the team the development of the core design system.

On account of the above decisions, we grew from an old centralized team with low efficiency into a great but diligent, cross-functional, and optimal team within merely one year.

B2B Service, Where the changes became tangible

In the course of the process of restructuring SnappTrip teams and processes, we realized the need for a specific team to develop products in the field of providing corporate solutions.

The number of corporate clients was increasing by the day, yet the old solutions were unable to meet the needs of our clients.

After constructing and finalizing the infrastructures and the resources of this team, we started a new initiative, which was the “B2B solutions” for our corporate clients.

Now was the best time for our great design team to:

We designed more user-centered. In the midst of this project were aligned our design process with Design Thinking. Given that, we tried to have a more holistic view of the product. Then, we divided the process of our design into smaller parts, plus defined, ideated, prototyped, and evaluated each of the features of our product with real users.
We tested our knowledge concerning the development of a design system, and we started the user interface design of the product on the basis of the design system for the first time in SnappTrip.
We sought to design more data-driven. We had access to invaluable behavioral data and dashboards. Now was the time to measure important metrics such as CR, AVG Basket, Session Duration, and other vital metrics and identify the problems and analyze them through qualitative methods.
We evaluated our performance in the field of UX research and improved our researches regarding the problems of our clients such as MTN, Huawei, and Unilever.

After a few months, we designed and developed this product. First, we shared a trial version of the new product with some of our clients who had a good relationship with our company. Then, we improved the product in terms of UX and performance in accordance with various tests and data analysis.

After a short while from releasing the final version for all of our users, we realized that by this new product we increase the Conversion rate, from Visit to Request up to 9% in this product.

On the other hand, we reduced Session Duration from Visit to Request down to 20%. It manifested that we made correct decisions regarding the design and layout, as well as interaction design and UX writing.

Eventually, we could increase the NPS of this product up to 12%.

The midst of my presence in SnappTrip, the commencement of challenges

Snapp rebranding, Onset of a great change

Considering the increase in the importance of design during my presence in the company, I was informed of the big rebranding of the Snapp group right from the initial stages.

SnappTrip rebranding gathering, Photographed by Danial Seyedin

Back then, the users had ideal familiarity with the Snapp brand, and the group was seeking to unify the services it rendered.

A great change was on the way, but …

Before the group rebranding, all aspects of this massive change should be assessed and this decision must be applied to all of the ventures of the group. In light of that, first, the ZooFood company was transformed into SnappFood. It proved that this change was successful, fruitful, and it could be extended to every other service of the group.

The time came for SnappTrip [which was operating under the title of Pintapin] to undergo this change, after SnappFood.

However, with regard to the state of the design in SnappTrip, this was the best time to unify the products that we have researched and evaluated for two years. Now:

We have developed a design system from the scratch for the B2B project of SnappTrip and we were familiar with its challenges.
Our teams and design infrastructure [files, documents, data, and tools] were non-centralized, and the team members were operating on the basis of a cross-functional and non-dependent structure.
The expansion of the design team was carried out properly and the team comprised of a sufficient number of product designers, UX writers, and UX researchers.

We started redesigning SnappTrip products in accordance with a precise but intensive plan. This project included redesigning and developing all of the following items:

Developing a design system for SnappTrip, considering the new identity of the group.
Redesigning and improving the UX of hotels service.
Redesigning and improving the UX of flight service.
Redesigning and improving the UX of the SnappTrip native app.
Redesigning or rewriting all touchpoints of the products such as emails, messages, and other notifications

Snapptrip app conceptual design by Farshid Darvishi

Every minute of those days was like a class for me. More than 100 people were designing and developing all sections of SnappTrip at the same time. I was responsible for raising the spirit and satisfaction of the design team and maintaining their physical and mental health during this time. Moreover, I was in charge of directing the SnappTrip rebranding project. Besides these two main responsibilities, I was supposed to check the new designs several times per day and attend workshops and design sprints of different teams. My other responsibilities included offering solutions to my teammates’ challenges regarding infrastructure and design, as well as investigating and evaluating the quality of the developed sections of the new product.

I remember the days when I was analyzing the data of the conversion rate of hotel service in one monitor and evaluated the new user flows of SnappTrip on another. In addition to them, I was listening to the recorded calls between the call center and one of the customers at the same time.

These few months passed in a heartbeat. I will never forget my anxious look at the dashboards the day all of our products were released for 100% of our users. Only within a few months, our data showed remarkable growth!

Hotels service obtained a 3% improvement in its conversion rate [from Visit to Request] and flight achieved a 2% growth in its conversion rate as well. These services were two of our most recent profitable changes.

An instant experience in booking hotels, Extranet service

I was one of the members of the seasonal strategy sessions of SnappTrip. I will not forget that during all these sessions, problems such as non-online or old hotel management systems of Iran were always discussed as one of the main obstacles to the company’s growth.

Due to these problems, we were unable to correspond to the growing trend of the number of users and their requests despite the great relationship of our supply chain team with hotels in Iran and the extent of our resources.

Now came the moment to not only satisfy our users but also cause a great leap in the hotel management industry of Iran with a massive and ambitious project.

Before any of that, the whole processes of the availability management and pricing of accommodations and hotels were carried out in SnappTrip by our supply chain team. These processes caused enormous problems since they were carried out by humans and lacked accuracy [especially during holidays and peak seasons]. However, the Extranet project was a solution to all problems. It constituent a management panel for the owners and managers and a back-office panel for SnappTrip.

This panel enabled the hotel and accommodation owners and managers to:

Manage the availability of their rooms and instantly share them with SnappTrip.
Keep their pricing process synced.
Monitor their performance at SnappTrip in form of a dashboard.
Offer various incentive plans for their hotels or accommodations.
Update the content displayed about their hotel or accommodations at SnappTrip.
Manage or update the legal contracts between themselves and SnappTrip.
Add new hotels or accommodations to SnappTrip.

This project is still one of the most challenging projects for me, which I was lucky enough to be a part of the process of its development.

Extranet early wireframes designed by Mahdieh Allameh

Let me share a part of these challenges with you:b

There was no domestic product in this regard for evaluation and Benchmark. The foreign products failed to meet every requirement of Iranian users.
The process of management of a hotel or accommodation itself was quite complex and full of unpredictable scenarios. Our solutions had to be developed via the easiest possible way to enable all users to simply use this product enjoying different levels of technical knowledge.
The hotels and accommodations were scattered all around Iran. Given that, it was difficult to access the users of this product for field researches.
The time of designing and developing this project was too short and the company was under a lot of pressure in this regard.

Finally, after months of ceaseless endeavors and amazing teamwork, holding several focus groups and design sprints with the owners and managers of various hotels and accommodations, and a variety of field and online usability tests, we designed and developed this product.

Now the hotel booking process in SnappTrip operated faster, more optimally, and with higher accuracy.

The onset of new cooperations

I was talking to Mark in one of our one-on-one sessions. It was the most important talk we ever had up to that time. Mark was discussing the new strategy of the group and the idea for transforming Snapp into a super application. During that session, he talked about a new position that he considered for me.

One of the necessities of developing any super application and its competitive advantage was the consistency of user experience in all services. Mark had recently become CPO of the group and offered me to take the position of leadership of design strategy, UX development, and design team for the new super application of Snapp group.

The following are my responsibilities upon accepting this offer:

Managing SnappTrip design team
Managing Snapp Ride-Hailing Service design team
Consultant in the field of designing to all ventures
Managing a design squad with more than 20 members, comprising the best designers of the ventures to design Snapp supper application

Then…

When I accepted this offer, I was transferred to the Snapp Headquarters and along with managing the Snapp design team, I cooperated with other ventures of the group on a daily basis, particularly SnappTrip.

During this time, I got acquainted with many wonderful friends and colleagues. People, some of whom are currently working at Snapp group and some are working at various international companies. I am still in touch with most of those friends, and their ever-increasing success brightens my day.

SnappTrip has never stopped developing its business and during recent years it had achieved impressive progress. The addition of new services such as villa booking, bus, train, international hotels and international flights services, together with multiplication of the company’s revenue and expansion of SnappTrip teams under the new leadership of Saba Mortazavi and Sahar Shishegar, are only a small part of the wide-ranging success of this company.

The time has come to finish the story of my cooperation with SnappTrip. In the second part of this article, I will talk about my experience in Snapp and directing the product design team at this company. Products that regarded as the greatest online ecosystem in Iran and the Middle East with more than three million daily active users.

Thank you for taking the time out to read my article.