Revolut-NoblyPos | Product & Design Leadership

Ranked by customers with a 5-Star TrustPilot Rating.
‍The industry's #1-Rated Point of Sale system

Acquired by Revolut in 2021
$2.5M Revenue EOY
1500+ served merchants over 30 countries
Under 100 employees

YEAR

2013-2019

COUNTRY

UK, USA

INDUSTRY

Payment Services & Hospitality

SERVICES

Head of Product & Design

DEVICES

Laptop

Desktop

TOOLS

Slack

Google Workspace

Figma

Illustrator

RESULT & IMPACT

NoblyPOS was acquired by Revolut in 2021, integrating the platform into Revolut's broader merchant services offering and expanding Revolut's footprint in the hospitality verticals.

↑1.5M ARR

Revenue: 67% growth

↓2.4%

Churn: below industry
average of 5-8%

1,600+

Merchants across
30 countries

4.3★

#1-rated POS by customers
TrustPilot

Two line charts side by side: Left chart shows overall monthly churn rate declining steadily from 2.7% in 2015 to about 2.35% in 2018, titled 'Overall month over month churn rate' under heading 'Overall Churn is below 3% and improving.' Right chart shows average annual recurring revenue per merchant rising from $0 in 2014 to about $1,700 in 2020, titled 'Average annual recurring revenue per merchant' under heading 'Subscription growth +32%'.

KEY DECISIONS & LEARNINGS

Success indicators defined at project outset: CSAT, Customer Effort Score, Average Time on Task, and Error Rate per journey. Infrastructure for measurement was scoped for post-launch implementation.

The Challenge: Allergen management emerged from an unexpected place. In restaurant interviews, waitresses mentioned it universally (100%). They needed a way to handle dietary restrictions without memorizing ingredients for every dish. Kitchen staff corroborated: ingredients change per dish; they need clarity. But here's the twist: managers only cared about it 6/10 intensity. Why? Managers prioritize revenue, efficiency, and back-office metrics. Allergen management, while operationally important, doesn't directly increase revenue. The upsale wasn't obvious.We faced a choice: Build for the primary economic buyer (manager) or build for the actual system users (waitresses, kitchen staff) who desperately needed it.

‍The Decision: Three strategic reasons convinced me to build it despite the manager indifference:
1. Competitive moat: Only one competitor had allergen management. Being first (or at parity) meant switching costs increased. Restaurants that invested in allergen setup wouldn't easily leave.
2. Employee retention: Reduced training time for waitresses + fewer kitchen errors = restaurant stability. We'd learned that employee satisfaction directly correlates to customer loyalty.
3. Trustpilot differentiation: We had a 4.3 star rating (#4 of 10 competitors). Allergens, combined with UX clarity and reliability, strengthened that it became a marketing differentiator for health-conscious restaurants.Implementation required managers to map ingredients to dishes (time-consuming setup), but usability testing showed 100% comprehension among waitresses and kitchen staff the feature design was intuitive. And critically, onboarding setup didn't significantly extend customer onboarding time.

‍The Outcome:
- Contributed to our 2.4% churn rate (below 3%, remarkable for the hospitality industry).
- Became a selling point for health-conscious restaurants and chains prioritizing food safety.
- Trustpilot lift: Customer reviews cited "comprehensive feature set and attention to operational detail".
- Cross-vertical value: Allergens worked for both coffee shops (dietary restrictions) and restaurants (liability, menu accuracy).

‍The Learning: Sometimes the most strategic features serve non-primary buyers. A manager might not drive adoption of allergens, but if waitresses and kitchen staff benefit enough, the restaurant becomes a stickier customer. Don't optimize exclusively for the economic buyer—optimize for the entire system. The person signing the contract matters less than the people using it daily.

Counter of a modern coffee shop with a point-of-sale touchscreen device, stacks of disposable cups, a water bottle, and a professional espresso machine in the background.

CONTEXT

WHAT IS NOBLY POS
NoblyPOS allowed coffee shops and restaurants to track their inventory, process payments, and review analytics of the health of their business. Coffe shops and restaurants need a way to process customer payments (cash, credit, debit), track inventory, analytics for their sales, stock wastage, track of promos and loyalty. Nobly was a tablet cloud-based point-of-sale (POS) management software that allowed hospitality services to manage all this.

WHY IT MATTERS
NoblyPOS helped hospitality businesses to process payments (receive cash and card payments), track sales, manage inventory and run loyalty programs. Manager dashboards provided customer management tools, and customized analytics to access to high quality information that is key in the decision-making process of managers.

‍

STRATEGY & PLANNING

MY ROLE
‍
Founding Designer (2013-2016)
Head of Product & Design (2018-2019)
‍
- First designer hired alongside a 5-person dev team.
- Worked directly with CEO on daily collaboration, long hours.
- Transitioned to Head of Product & Design collaborated directly with the CPO & CTO.

MY TEAM
‍
- 1-3 Engineer Managers
- 1 Sales Manager
- 1 Customer Service Manager
- 15-20 Developers (iOS & Backend)
- 1-3 Designers & Researchers (Product & Marketing)

MY CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

PHASE 1 - PRODUCT MARKET FIT (2013-2016)
I designed the first version of NoblyPOS from 0 to 1
- Design system & branding: Define components and guidelines.
- Product discovery: Collaborate with the CEO to define the top features and user journeys.
- Product architecture: Define the sitemap, wireframes, user journeys.
- Usability testing & prototyping: Lead user testing and developer demos.
- Development handoff and Q&A.
- Design marketing content.

PHASE 2 - MARKET EXPANSION (2018-2019)
Head of Product & Design. I was tasked to research a new industry vertical (restaurants & bars) on an new market (US). And then design & deliver a new Android app leading a team of devs, , researchers, designers and collaborating with stakeholders from sales, customer service and loyal clients.
- Benchmark analysis: Test and compare competitor products.
- Research: Plan and design client & user research, interviews, & user testing for the designed product.
- Feature discovery: Report findings of new features per user segment.
- Product vision: Prioritize and define new app stories, among with the CPO & CTO.
- Roadmap definition: Orchestrate and manage among different teams, research, design, development, sales and customer service.
- Design, testing and delivery of the first version of NoblyPOS for restaurants & bars.

WHERE NOBLYPOS INNOVATED
Back in 2013

1. Vertical specialization
Purpose-built for hospitality, small coffee shops, take-away food, restaurants and bars.

2. Integrated cloud platform
Payments + back-office operations in one SaaS system.

3. Right timing Rode the iPad wave (tablets becoming mainstream), cloud adoption, and fintech maturation simultaneously.

4. Lower barrier to entry
No expensive hardware lock-in.

PHASE 1 : PRODUCT MARKET FIT

Business Outcome:

User's Benefits:

Technical Challenge:

Reach product market fit.

Managers no longer rely on XML exports to analyze data.
- Dashboards introduced real-time KPIs, delivery performance tracking, and monthly order trends.

- Define the Core vendor journeys: purchase orders, invoices, deliveries, redesigned from static tables (XML Excel) to interactive, filterable views.
- Documented design system: standardizing the UI, reducing the effort required to design and build new features.

MARKET COMPETITORS
Before the mobile/cloud revolution, small hospitality businesses had brutal options:
‍
- Traditional POS systems were hardware-heavy, expensive, required capital investment and IT support.
‍
- Early mobile POS solved payments elegantly, but lacked hospitality-specific features (kitchen displays, table management, order routing, inventory tracking, loyalty programs, etc.)

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Researching top competitors on the industry from features, pricing, business model and customer reviews revealed NoblyPOS had a strong opportunity developing features industry specific for the niche of coffe shops.
I coordinated a team with a Product Designer, a Customer Service Manager and Sales Manager to review, compare, rate and share their notes and thoughts over a benchmark analysis. This gave me multiple perspectives on our market position.

BRANDING & DESIGN SYSTEM
Alongside with the design of the app the design system started to come along. Back in 2013, there was no concept of design libraries, but we had design kits. I saved all resources on an illustrator file, that later evolved to become the first design system of our product.

SITEMAP & CONTENT REQUIREMENTS

CREATE THE USER STORIES
Each feature required a context for development, explaining the goalf for the user, understanding edge cases and defining acceptance criteria.

WIREFRAME + MICRO INTERACTIONS
Micro interactions were crucial for the bill component where we designed gestures like slide to delete, long press to edit, tap for changing quantity.

On the Main menu we had different components as items vs folders, so animations were needed to depict the behaviour of moving elements around.

DEVELOPMENT GUIDELINES
Over the years the development handoff system changed from illustrator and manual drawn notes on the canvas, to using sketch and zepplin, to then migrating to figma and defining the design system and components. Our team always adapted and adopted to new emerging tooling.