How can a product team stay competitive when massively outnumbered? At Bolt Food, we built and scaled a food delivery product from scratch in just 6 months, competing with much larger teams like Wolt. This talk shares the principles, mindset, and execution model that allowed a 150-person team with only 9 product designers to deliver meaningful outcomes across a complex ecosystem.
You’ll learn how ruthless focus, pragmatic leadership, and deliberate hiring help us not just survive, but lead. From high-impact design sprints to building product vision under extreme constraints, this session will offer concrete takeaways for anyone building in fast-paced, resource-limited environments.
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In this WaysConf 2025 presentation, Pavel Zubarev, Product Design Manager at Bolt Food, shares how a small, highly constrained design team can outperform larger competitors by embracing extreme pragmatism and a "honey badger" culture. Starting with just 25 people and a six-month deadline to launch Bolt Food in 2019, the team bypassed traditional user research in favor of competitive analysis and a hyper-focused MVP. Today, despite being outnumbered six-to-one by competitor design teams, Bolt Food operates in 17 countries and 200 cities. Zubarev details "Project Yummy," a rapid vision-building framework that utilized a physical immersion trip to London and collaborative design workshops to generate 43 new features in just eight man-weeks. This strategic initiative not only mapped out the product's future but also elevated the design team's status to true strategic partners within a traditionally engineering-driven organization.
When facing extreme time constraints, skipping lengthy primary user research to analyze established competitors allows a small team to launch a functional MVP quickly. Bolt Food designed three distinct apps in just six weeks by learning from competitors' existing market solutions.
Watch from 2:22Success with limited resources requires a relentless focus on high-ROI tasks and deciding what not to do. Bolt Food embraces a "honey badger" mentality, prioritizing features that directly drive business metrics, such as customer incentives, over non-essential features.
Watch from 6:39Small teams can move faster than large organizations by giving designers end-to-end ownership and accountability. By working independently without constant reliance on dedicated researchers, copywriters, or product managers, designers eliminate the dependencies that typically slow down product development.
Watch from 8:30Remote research cannot fully replicate the physical experience of using a service in a highly competitive environment. The Bolt Food design team traveled to London to physically test competitor services, documenting pain points and opportunities that informed their long-term product vision.
Watch from 10:38Creating a tangible, high-fidelity product vision can transform how an organization approaches long-term planning. "Project Yummy" generated 43 new features using minimal resources, proving design's value and establishing designers as strategic partners alongside product and engineering.
Watch from 16:10These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.
In early 2019, shortly after joining the company then known as Taxify, Pavel Zubarev was tasked by the Chief Product Officer to lead the design for a new food delivery vertical. The business objective was highly aggressive: launch the service within six months. This extreme timeline was driven by market dynamics, as the company wanted to establish itself in target markets before global giants like Uber Eats could enter, which would have significantly raised customer and merchant acquisition costs.
Watch from 0:04To meet the management's six-month launch deadline, the product design phase was compressed into just two weeks per application for the courier, merchant, and consumer platforms. Because the engineering teams needed to build the backend architecture and user interface in parallel, high-fidelity mockups had to be delivered immediately. Consequently, the team skipped traditional user research, interviews, and surveys, relying entirely on competitive analysis of established players like Wolt to avoid costly operational mistakes in a low-margin industry.
Watch from 1:42Despite growing to 150 people with nine design and research staff, Bolt Food remains significantly outnumbered by competitors who employ hundreds of R&D professionals and dozens of designers. To compete, Bolt relies on a "honey badger" culture characterized by fearlessness and extreme pragmatism. This philosophy demands that the team ruthlessly prioritize high-ROI tasks, focusing only on initiatives that move the needle while actively deciding what not to do to keep the massive product backlog manageable.
Watch from 6:36To improve the annual planning process, the design team initiated a project to visualize the long-term product roadmap. The process began with a physical immersion trip to London, a highly competitive market where Bolt Food does not operate delivery. By physically placing themselves in the environment and executing numerous test orders, pickups, and customer support scenarios, the designers uncovered critical user pain points and competitive advantages that could not be replicated through remote research.
Watch from 9:49Following the London research trip, the design team consolidated their findings onto a massive Figma board. Through two collaborative three-hour workshops, six designers transformed low-fidelity wireframes into high-fidelity mockups. This effort culminated in a comprehensive prototype representing Bolt Food's five-year vision, featuring 43 entirely new capabilities. The entire project required only eight man-weeks of dedicated effort from two individual contributors, proving that impactful product visions do not require massive teams or years of development.
Watch from 12:12
