Transform your Automation Suite Into a Testing Product — Part 1

When we talk about the test product that is owned and managed by the testing team, what comes to your mind immediately. Is it a test suite, test management tool, or any defect tracking tool? I guess the most obvious one that comes to your mind is the test suite…

Giving the power of data in hands of your data analyst

Over the last 3 years, our data analytics team has grown from one central team of 4 to over 100 members. Our analysts are spread across our data team, business functions and data science teams. So needless to say, as both data and the team grew, our ways of working…

What Is Product Management?

Design by Asif Jamal After talking to leaders of different expertise from multiple startups and being in a product role myself for over four years, I discovered that there is still ambiguity around what a product manager brings to the table. Although, a good part of my understanding of the role has been shaped…

Grofers Lambda: A 2019 Year-In-Review

The most-read authors, stories, and what’s coming in 2020. In 2019, we increased our focus on Lambda with an aim to share stories that give you an insider look into the tech and people that run Grofers. As a result, 2019 turned out to be an incredible year of learning for all of us at Grofers engineering. Best? our…

In focus: Vinayak Mehta

In focus is a blog series where we move the lens toward our engineers at Grofers and have a conversation on with them about things that make them tick. Vinayak is a software engineer in our data team and is based out of our Bangalore office. He joined us in…

On Setting Up Our AWS VPC

TL;DR: This blog post is about the choices we made while trying to organize our infrastructure resources in AWS VPC and automating everything around it. Our Infrastructure So Far Since we signed up on AWS fairly recently, we were given a VPC by default. We used to launch EC2 instances seamlessly…

Supercharging Mobile Backend Development using ngrok & OpenResty

If you are developing mobile applications, it’s likely that you are getting data from a bunch of backend APIs. An API backend is a must if you want to develop for multiple platforms like Android, iOS, web etc While developing such API backend locally, sometimes you need…

Show and Tell S02E01

How I Work: Devika Razdan

At Grofers, we have some of the smartest people who collaborate to do great work. Over the years, these individuals have crafted their own systems and tools for productivity and in this series, we share how they excel using the systems, methods, and tools that work for them. Over the…

Postmortem: Outage due to Elasticsearch’s flexibility and our carelessness

On November 25 at 4:30 AM, our consumer apps stopped working because of some issue with our backend API. This article is a postmortem of what happened that night. Some Background Our product search and navigation is served from Elasticsearch. We create daily index of products, related merchant data…

Data and the bid to simplify grocery

The most critical thing for any business to understand is what their user is looking for and address those needs efficiently. This can be done through collecting explicit user feedback as well as by analyzing their behavior on the platform through the rich engagement…

Is your MVP slowing you down?

Over time, the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has started meaning different things to different people. Before I proceed to put my point across, it will be helpful to…

Do You Need A Personal OKR?

Design by Asif Jamal Making a contract with your future self When we started using OKRs in Grofers, it was to ensure that we had a way of getting everyone on the same page around what was important towards our goals as a team and as a company. This exercise taught us a lot and although we’ve failed in every…

Building a technology first company

Over the past few years, we have seen rise of tech companies. There are a lot of definitions of what truly is a technology company. There are also different terminologies like “tech driven”, “tech enabled” and “pure tech”. And the debate goes on… At Grofers, our vision is to be…

Grofers Virtual Hackday 2020

Everyone at Grofers Tech loves Hackathons because this is one day when we forget all the worries of the world and jump right into solving problems. Be it an old idea solved using a new tech or a new idea solved with just an excel prototype, this is a day…

A Day in Release Engineering at Grofers

This post touches up facets of what release engineering is at Grofers and what the life of an engineer on this team looks like. After reading this, one should get an idea about why it is important to us, what is an engineer supposed to do to support the team…

It’s a million small things that matter

I joined Grofers in July 2018 from a young startup to throw myself into a previously unexplored territory of the Indian e-commerce and to experience product management at 10x the scale I have been working at. To my delight, the last four months have been no less than a roller…

How to use your private NPM packages with Docker on CI

Our team recently came across a strange issue where one of our application was failing to build after we installed another internal library as a dependency to this app. This was very strange as we were able to get it working on our local machines and the only thing separating…

Reducing AWS data transfer cost: Kubernetes from Multi-AZ to Single-AZ

The only silver lining for us during COVID-19 was that we got a chance to optimize our resources in our run to cut costs — a long-pending activity. All the teams across the organization were focused on reducing the operating costs as much as possible. Similarly, DevOps teams were mainly…

Open-sourcing codon: workflow framework for building aggregator APIs

As a startup, we need to experiment with our product a lot — constantly changing our UI and our backend processes to support new experimental features…

React Native at Grofers: Using React Native components inside native views

Horizontal scrolling widget has been built in…

How DevOps Is Making Managers Redundant And Why That’s a Good Thing

A guide to scaling tech organizations without adding too many people or processes. I head product and engineering for Grofers, the largest online grocer in India. Grofers has grown by over 11x — from $60MM in GMV to nearly $700MM — in the last 24 months. A big part of this success has been the ability of our team to go from idea…

Community Update: Announcing Grofers Tech Talks!

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Origins of Data Lake at Grofers

Design by Asif Jamal The Beginning As Data Engineers at the biggest online grocery company in India, one of our major challenges is to democratize data across the organization. But, when we began evaluating how well we were doing on this goal, we realized that frequent errors in our data pipelines had caused our business teams…

How To Decide The Success Metrics For Your Product

Design by Asif Jamal I have repeatedly made this mistake of looking at the wrong metrics for the new products that we released. The realization of these mistakes made me seek mentoring from some of the accomplished product folks. I wish I had reached out for their mentoring even earlier to grow faster. Young…