For a Seamless User Experience: The Journey (opens in new tab)

To provide a seamless user experience, Baedal Minjok (Baemin) successfully integrated KakaoTalk brand vouchers directly into its ordering system, overcoming significant technical and organizational barriers between platforms. This project was driven by a mission to resolve long-standing customer friction and strategically capture external purchase demand within the Baemin ecosystem. By bridging the gap between Kakao’s gifting infrastructure and Baemin’s delivery network, the team successfully transformed a fragmented journey into a unified, user-centric service.

Bridging User Friction and Business Growth

• Addressed persistent Voice of Customer (VOC) complaints from users who found it inconvenient to use KakaoTalk vouchers through separate brand apps or physical store visits.
• Aimed to capture untapped external traffic and convert it into active order volume within the Baemin platform, enhancing customer retention and "lock-in" effects.
• Defined the project’s core essence as "connection," which served as a North Star for decision-making when technical constraints or business interests conflicted.

Navigating Multi-Party Stakeholder Complexity

• Coordinated a massive ecosystem involving Kakao (the platform), F&B brands, third-party voucher issuers, and internal Baemin backend teams.
• Managed conflicting KPIs across organizations, balancing Kakao’s requirement for platform stability with voucher issuers' needs for settlement clarity.
• Employed "context-aware communication" to bridge terminology gaps, such as reconciling Baemin’s "register and use" logic with the voucher companies' "inquiry and approval" workflows.

Standardizing External Voucher Integration

• Developed a standardized technical framework to accommodate diverse external voucher issuers while maintaining a consistent and simple interface for the end-user.
• Resolved technical trade-offs regarding API response speeds, error-handling policies, and real-time validation across disparate systems.
• Empowered Product Managers to act as "technical translators" and "captains," proactively managing complex dependency chains and prioritizing core features over secondary improvements to meet delivery timelines.

The successful integration of KakaoTalk vouchers demonstrates that overcoming platform silos requires more than just technical API mapping; it requires a fundamental shift toward user-centric thinking. By prioritizing the "seamlessness" of the connection over individual platform boundaries, organizations can unlock significant new growth opportunities and deliver a superior digital experience.