The situation
A New York-based client wanted to combine food ordering with charitable giving — every order placed would automatically route a percentage to registered non-profits, with participating restaurants contributing a share of their revenue too. The idea was straightforward. The execution wasn’t.
Three different stakeholder groups had to work in unison — users ordering food, restaurant partners splitting revenue, and non-profit organizations receiving and tracking donations. Any failure in the payment logic didn’t just break a transaction. It broke a promise to a charity.
What I was hired to do
Own end-to-end delivery. Align three stakeholder groups, manage a payment-integrated build, and get it to production.
What I actually built
A web platform where users order food, restaurants manage their participation and revenue splits, and non-profits onboard, track incoming donations, and report on impact. Every transaction automatically triggers the donation logic — no manual reconciliation, no chasing partners for contributions.
Payment integration was where the delivery risk lived. Worked closely with the technical team to ensure the gateway integration followed security and compliance best practices from the start — not as a final audit, but as a design constraint. QA cycles ran specifically against payment accuracy and donation calculation logic before anything else. A platform that gets the food right but gets the donation wrong has failed at its core purpose.
Stakeholder coordination across restaurants, non-profits, and the client ran in parallel throughout. Each group had different workflows, different expectations, and different definitions of done. Keeping all three aligned without letting any one group’s requirements derail the others was the real management challenge.
The result
A production-ready platform that automated what was previously uncoordinated — users gave without friction, restaurants contributed without manual overhead, and non-profits had full visibility into incoming donations.
Six months, three stakeholder groups, one clean handover.