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, and participating restaurants would contribute a share of their revenue as well. The idea was straightforward, but the execution was not.
Three stakeholder groups had to work in unison: users ordering food, restaurant partners splitting revenue, and non-profit organizations receiving and tracking donations. A failure in the payment logic would not just break a transaction; it would break a promise to a charity.
What I was brought in to do
I owned end-to-end delivery, which meant aligning three stakeholder groups, managing a payment-integrated build, and getting it to production.
What I built
I 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, so there is no manual reconciliation and no chasing partners for contributions.
Most of the delivery risk lived in the payment integration. I worked closely with the technical team so that the gateway integration followed security and compliance best practices from the start, treating it as a design constraint rather than a final audit. QA cycles ran specifically against payment accuracy and donation-calculation logic before anything else, because getting the donation wrong would have defeated the platform’s 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, and keeping all three aligned without letting any one group’s requirements derail the others was the central management challenge.
The result
The platform shipped as a production-ready system that automated what had previously been uncoordinated: users gave without friction, restaurants contributed without manual overhead, and non-profits had full visibility into incoming donations. It was delivered over six months across three stakeholder groups, with a clean handover.