Blinkit

Challenges

1. Dependency & Lost productive hours - Before App CMS, Grofers marketing & category teams depended on the engineering team for widget controls, running A/B tests and various other tasks that could be self-service and better managed by Marketing teams. This impacted not only the marketing team's productivity but also the productive time of the engineering team that could have been invested somewhere else.
2. Tread with Caution - As the CMS work directly impacts the App experience and in turn primary user experience of Grofers, it was really important that integration must not fall short on Performance, Aesthetics & UI Integration with Native elements.
3. Future Looking - Though our first mandate was to enable Marketing team with CMS function, it was very evident from the start that the solution has to be flexible and accommodate advance marketing needs to personalise experiences, running A/B Tests, segmenting content/offers and enable integration with rest of the Marketing Tech stack like clever tap etc.

Our Approach

• Exploratory workshop - Grofers App is powered by complex, distributed, cloud infrastructure with many moving parts as a business of that scale would require. Our first step to scope the effort was to understand the engineering infrastructure that powers the app and analysing the risks, after a meeting and multiple rounds of Q&A we presented our solution & a Demo that exposed a JSON that could be consumed by Mobile Apps. This instilled the confidence to commission a proof of concept that looked to validate core integration with the app.
• Proof of Concept - The second stage was to check the core integration and see if we face issues in basic integration, for this we chose banners and couple of simple widgets on the app to be controlled by CMS. 3 weeks into the proof of concept, we are now much more confident of being on the right path.
• Technology Selection - We needed a RESTful Application framework with core CMS skills like authoring experience, access control etc. We chose Drupal for Rapid Application Development and robust CMS competencies, Drupal 8 being RESTful from the ground up made integrations very straight forward and we could employ Decoupled Drupal paradigm to its full potential.
• Business Alignment - Once we validated our proof of concept, rather than taking a full backlog approach and defining ultimate scope it made more sense to align our sprints to business events and team short term needs, for instance, we focused on just performance around GOBD — Grand Orange Bag Days, Grofers bi-annual black Friday sale equivalent. This approach allowed us to test our solutions very quickly in real-time situations.

Special Features

Our Custom Development: Updates on the Android and iOS apps were directly controlled by the Content Management System. This use case is very specific to Grofers and was not contributed to Drupal.org.

Outcomes

• Self Sufficiency of Marketing Team allowed for better productivity, lesser to and fro, more control over the marketing communication on the app.
• Saved Many productive hours of Grofers Engineering Team to focus on the core product.
• Reduced the content roll-out time drastically with Do it Yourself CMS.
• Allowing for more marketing experiments and better personalisations with Do it Yourself Experiments.
• Handled recent GOBD traffic without any outage or issues.