A decade ago, Picnic set out to reinvent grocery shopping with a tech-first, customer-centric approach. What began as a bold experiment quickly grew into a high-scale operation, powered by continuous innovation and a willingness to challenge conventions.
Along the way, we’ve learnt invaluable lessons about scaling technology, fostering culture, and driving innovation. Some were expected, others were hard-earned, and a few completely reshaped our thinking.
Here are 10 key lessons we’ve learnt—along with how the industry is tackling similar challenges.
1. Building a culture of innovation
Early on, we identified that culture and organisation are key enablers for innovation. Hence, we emphasised autonomy by forming small teams that take end-to-end ownership. We were inspired by Amazon’s two-pizza teams, where small, self-sufficient teams are encouraged to innovate without bureaucracy.
However, we took it a step further and built an “Everybody is an Innovator” culture and combined it with our existing “Everybody is an Engineer” culture. Business operators outside of the tech organisation can now actively contribute to the feature design, specification, development and configuration. For instance, we developed frameworks like Define, Extract, Transform, Present (DETP), where analysts can use SQL to build personalised recommendations without the involvement of engineering teams. Furthermore, we developed the Picnic Page Platform that allows business operators and analysts to ship app features independently from the software development cycle.
The key metrics we optimise for are the idea-to-impact lead time and the time share of innovating and building vs maintaining and operating. We haven’t reached our goal yet, but we are on a good path towards everybody spending at least 80% of their time on innovation and development.
