With the proliferation of food delivery services and subscription meal boxes, Plated is unique in that it's the only product of its kind that offers a personalized experience for the customer. This is powered by the company’s software, which is designed to allow customers control over the farm-fresh meals they receive on their doorsteps.
Behind this powerful technology are Plated’s engineers, who are product-driven when it comes to developing the company’s platform.
We caught up with Bay Phillips, Lead iOS Engineer at Plated, to discuss his experience working for one of the most popular food startups in New York City.
Built In: What is the first thing you do when you come into the office every day?
Bay Phillips: I’ll generally come into the office around 9:30 a.m. and drink about two cups of coffee from our kitchen. If it’s hot out, like it is now, I’ll grab an iced coffee from one of the many places around us, particularly Brooklyn Roasters (their Maple Shay is fantastic if folks haven’t tried it yet). Then I’ll usually read through any Slack messages I might have missed (aka gifs).
BI: On a day to day basis, what are your responsibilities and priorities?
BP: Engineers here at Plated are extremely product driven. We’re constantly in communication with our product managers and designers throughout the day which allows for some pretty awesome collaboration. My daily responsibilities include writing actual code (shocking), mostly Swift although I’m often found dabbling in our REST APIs, and performing code reviews. Being a tech lead also means that I’m responsible for working with the rest of the engineering team to ensure our current iteration of work is on track to be completed in a timely manner—this means less micromanaging and more removing any potential impediments to our work.
BI: What is the engineering team culture like at Plated? Any traditions?
BP: Our team culture is embodied in the fact that we’re extremely customer- and product-driven. Not only is this reflected in the features that we build out, but also in our enthusiasm for the technology leveraged in making it all happen. The amount of ownership we take over our respective areas allows for us to have an incredible amount of pride in the work.
One of our traditions, and one I’m particularly biased towards, is every Friday evening we take over one of our large conference rooms and play games. It ranges from classic video game consoles on the big screen (Mario Tennis or Super Smash Bros are our current addiction) or a group of people playing around a table with board games (Settlers of Catan matches can get pretty heated).
BI: How does the engineering team collaborate with other teams within the company?
BP: Our engineering guild is broken up into customer experience teams, which means there’s constant collaboration outside of just technology. For example, our acquisition engineering team works hand in hand with our marketing and creative guilds while our Retention team has representatives from our culinary and retention-focused marketing guilds. These other guilds are considered valued stakeholders in the prioritization and implementation of the work done for each respective team.
BI: What projects goals/is your team currently working on?
BP: The mobile team is currently working on leveraging the unique capabilities of the iOS platform to better our customer’s experience. We believe that food is an extremely personal experience and a smartphone provides an incredible amount of context into who our users are and what they like to do.
BI: What’s an important lesson you’ve learned while working at Plated?
BP: It’s okay to make a mistake as long as you’re not being careless and you don’t do it again. I learned this when I worked on a particularly difficult feature for our iOS application, only to realize it was broken by the time it was pushed out to the App Store. The moment I realized my mistake, I let people know and proposed the next steps as well as how we could prevent a similar incident from happening again. Apple has an application update approval process which used to take at least 7 days for any updates to be released to the public, so this wasn’t just a quick fix and it should have been caught ahead of time. Everyone I worked with was supportive and appreciated the follow up to my mistake—and then we moved on.
BI: What is the last thing you do before you leave the office every day?
BP: I always make sure to go into our kitchen to see if we have any food left over from our culinary team. Every day they’re testing out new recipes and we get to reap the benefits of that. There’s nothing better than grabbing a chicken meatball slider before heading home.
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