Lessons From An Office Foodbot, And How To Build One

When a company is growing fast, just ordering lunch can become a huge time-sink. Brazil's biggest video platform hacked together a solution that not only saved time, but taught the entire company how to reduce friction. We want our engineers doing one of two things in the office: developing software or playing Xbox (or foosball, or pool) to relax. When we moved to a bigger office, there was a lot more space to lounge around, so people developed the habit of ordering lunch to be delivered. The result was routine chaos at lunch time. Somebody had to be the ringleader, reminding everybody that it was lunch time, before taking orders down and emailing them to the caterer. There were mistakes, and some days employees got the wrong lunch or no lunch at all. Things got more complicated when we realized the caterer’s menu changed weekly. Being engineers, we sought to optimize the del...