Global Content Operations at Glovo
Glovo is a Barcelona-based delivery platform. Every restaurant in the app needs a digital menu: items, prices, and descriptions, in the local language and sometimes in more than one. I was a director in Global Content Operations, and my territories were Latin America plus the Middle East and Africa, including Morocco, Turkey, and Egypt.
What a menu actually looks like
In an established market, a restaurant hands over something structured: a PDF, a spreadsheet, a website to scrape. In many of my markets, the menu Glovo received was a photo of a handwritten page or the sandwich board outside the door, because that is the same menu the restaurant’s walk-in customers get. Items often had names and no descriptions, so writing a usable description of each dish fell to us. Turning that into standardized, translated, platform-ready content at scale was the core of the job, and the lift was heaviest exactly where the growth was: the developing markets.
The 30-day menu change
When a restaurant needed a change to their menu in the app, an item, a description, a price, they submitted a ticket. The backlog on those tickets could run to 30 days. Now put that SLA in a market where the menu genuinely changes day to day, or in a high-inflation economy like Argentina or Turkey, where the price of meat moves daily and menu prices have to move with it. A restaurant waiting a month for a price update is showing wrong prices the entire time. Fixing this pipeline was my problem to solve.
Splitting the pipeline
The structural fault was that every market’s requests flowed through shared pipelines, so the countries generating daily changes were setting the pace for everyone else. I restructured the request pipeline so high-frequency markets stopped bogging down the rest, and I began offshoring content operations by language rather than by geography: Spanish-language content, including Spain’s, though Spain sat outside my territory, to a hub in Latin America, and French-language content to Morocco. Organizing by language put native speakers on the content, kept quality consistent across markets that share a language, and let each hub build real expertise instead of every market improvising alone.
Why it mattered
Menu content is the storefront. For thousands of restaurants, what Glovo showed in the app was the difference between an order and a scroll-past. The pipeline work meant a taqueria in Buenos Aires or a kebab shop in Istanbul could trust that what the app said matched what the kitchen charged, on days when that changed daily.