Powering a Product Squad to Develop a Food and Grocery Delivery App

About the client

Our client is a food and grocery delivery business serving up to 9 million orders per month through its mobile app. It concentrates mainly on restaurants, with about 6% of its total orders coming from the Groceries vertical (before Netguru started to work on this project).

A vast majority of those orders originated from Quick Market, a network of dark stores specializing in 20-minute deliveries, while some of them came from third-party partners, mainly high-assortment convenience stores.

Client’s expectations

The client approached Netguru looking for a tech partner to build and continuously enhance the mobile app segment flow for ordering groceries.

More specifically, they expected that the tech partner would:

• define the tech direction and flow of the Groceries vertical within the app (this included the UX and UI).
• address the existing problems, needs, and desires of the user base
• discover and take up new business opportunities for the product.
• design an app flow that meets the latest standards of booming q-commerce.
• improve specific KPIs including Number of Orders, Average Basket Value, and Conversion Rate.

Netguru’s role in the project and services provided

As part of this ongoing project, Netguru worked on backend development, mobile development for both Android and iOS apps, plus UX and UI design.

Netguru augments the client’s Product Squad with a dedicated Product Manager, Senior UX Designer, as well as iOS and Android engineers. In the first year of our cooperation, the team also included two Netguru backend engineers. The client engaged a Senior Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Senior Product Analyst, QA, and Backend Engineer in the Product Squad.

The Product Squad is responsible for product discovery, delivery, and further development. Netguru was able to contribute to driving a coherent product growth in a highly collaborative environment by working as part of a robust product organization composed of over ten cross-functional and autonomous teams, as well as collaborating with product, marketing, operations, commercial, and logistics departments.

Blending into the existing engineering and reporting culture of the client under the guidance of the organization’s leadership was one of the key factors that led the Product Squad to success in this engagement.

Netguru maintains high autonomy in the project while continuing to work on par with the client’s experts.

How Netguru approached the project

Improving the Groceries ordering flow as part of a broader application required looking way beyond tech. To translate the client’s global patterns into the local customer base, Netguru initiated interdisciplinary initiatives between Product, Tech, Marketing, and Operations. To yield the expected results, we had to understand the customers, local context, and evaluate the competition. A field trip was an important part of getting to know the environment in which the app is used.

These allowed the Product Squad to discover the following product challenges:

• Misaligned OKRs –they were focused on delivering a set of initiatives on a quarterly basis rather than generating the specified results.
• Few touchpoints with end users offered limited knowledge about customers (historically, their user research focused mainly on restaurant visitors), while this typically offers plenty of insights into business opportunities.
• Lack of involvement of the engineering team in the design process hampered the software quality.

Continuous discovery mindset

To tackle these challenges, the Product Squad shifted its approach from delivery-driven to focused on deep cooperation oriented at uncovering new business opportunities. To this end:

• The Product Manager and Senior UX Designer approached the Customer Experience team with a plan to run an ongoing interview process, scripted by Netguru.
• The Squad conducted workshops with stakeholders to define three major user personas.
• The Squad prepared an Opportunity-Solution Tree, mapping out existing product opportunities with desired outcomes to increase conversion rates.

Periodic UX review

The continuous discovery mindset also translates into UX improvements. A thorough UX review was carried out at the beginning of the project to capture the most pressing issues and opportunities for product growth. The review was repeated a year later to gain a fresh perspective on the issues and identify further growth potential.

Ongoing product development

Throughout the project, the Product Squad, including Netguru engineers, concentrates on continuously developing the product:

They take initiative in raising issues and proposing new ways to improve the UX and increase the overall value of the Groceries vertical of the app.

The engineers make decisions oriented at delivering value to the users and the business by taking care of sustainability, scalability, and the overall technical quality of the application.

They focus on building and strengthening cooperation with the client by observing every stage of the creation process, helping to refine the product and getting involved whenever issues arise.

They prioritize technical improvements taking into account both short- and long-term impacts, e.g., they are helping prioritize tech debt mitigation without slowing down the pace of innovation.

Results of the cooperation

This ongoing project is a highly collaborative effort in which Netguru works as part of the client’s Product Squad to drive growth of the Groceries vertical within the client’s core app. The client has already received:

• A 100% autonomous Product Squad built in cooperation with Netguru, operating fully like the client’s internal team and driving the project.
• A complete mobile grocery experience that lets consumers seamlessly fulfill their shopping needs.
• A winning flow among the umbrella brand’s platforms for the q-commerce segment, with praised technical results – good metrics on software quality and delivery time:
• iOS and Android Unit test coverage of 85%, up from 63% and 28% respectively in 2021 (above the average for the whole app, which is less than 50%).
• We were the first team to deliver 100% UI test automation of critical paths (the current coverage of the whole app in this regard is around 60%).

• Conversion grew by 81%
• Average Basket Value increased by 21%
• Monthly number of orders increased by 97%