Zomato — Agile approach for product development

Zomato is an Indian multinational restaurant aggregator and food delivery company founded by Deepinder Goyal, Pankaj Chaddah, and Gunjan Patidar in 2008. Zomato provides information, menus and user-reviews of restaurants as well as food delivery options from partner restaurants in select cities.

Introduction to Agile Methodology

Product Development process allows you to understand the scale of the product and its impact on the market. It is nothing but the process through which a product goes when it is developed. It usually comprises the following steps

• Vision
• Inception of new idea
• Market Research
• Planning
• Design
• Execution & Development
• Monitoring and controlling
• Deployment
• Sustainance

What is Agile?

By Definition of the wiki:

Agile software development describes an approach to software development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)/end user(s). It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continual improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change.

Why Agile?

Agile came about as a “solution” to the disadvantages of the waterfall methodology. Instead of a sequential design process, the Agile methodology follows an incremental approach.

Agile is a combination of iterative and incremental process models with a focus on process adaptability and customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of working software product.

It is a practice that promotes continuous iteration and incremental development throughout the software/product lifecycle. In this methodology, the customer has early and frequent opportunities to look at the product and make decision and changes to the product.

The agile software development emphasizes on four core values.

1. Individual and team interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

Scrum framework is one of the most widely used Agile approach for product development. Some of the terminologies used in Scrum are:

Scrum Framework

1. Product Owner — This person communicates with various stakeholders, creates and maintains product backlog, and works to maximize the ROI on the product.
2. Scrum Master — A role orthogonal to Product Owner, this person helps the team achieve the task and build long term sustainability. He is a coach for the team.
3. Developers — Everyone else on the team is called a developer, irrespective of their qualifications, expertise, and work.
4. Product Backlog — This is an artifact created by the Product Owner. This contains all the requirements in the form of user stories. These stories will someday become a part of the working software.
5. Sprint — It is a time-boxed period in which the team accepts some user stories given by the Product Owner and works to convert them to working software at the end of it.
6. Sprint Backlog — Top priority items from the Product Backlog that the team will work upon in the sprint are put in the Sprint Backlog. These stories will ideally become the working software at the end of the current race.

Agile Methodology being followed for the following feature development in Zomato:

## Rate/Review a restaurant

Ratings & Reviews empowers customers to share their opinions and experiences, wherever they dine verifying the quality of a restaurant and the expected knowledge of the food and the restaurant as a whole.

1. Restaurant rating on the scale of 1 to 5 ( 1 is lowest where 5 is highest)

2. Adding review for the restaurant.

3. Facility to take and attach pics in the review comments.

4. SMS/E-mail to get rating for continuous improvement in service.

## Filters for search

Adding filters to search bar will help the users find the restaurants as per their relevance. Filters could be added as an increment on the existing search. The different increments for searching would be:

1.Searching on the basis of food type (Veg/Non-veg)

2. Searching on the basis of location of service

3· Searching on the basis of restaurent/ user ratings

4· Searching on the basis of discount/offers

## Online Ordering

Zomato already has the details and menus of the restaurants listed on its site. Now it wants to start the online ordering from its app/site. So for this feature the options to add food into the cart, add address and make payment through debit card are the basic necessities, which will be added in the first iteration.

Depending upon the feedback from the users, following increments could be released:

1. Online ordering.

2. Show Estimated Time for delivery .

3. Online Payment options.

4. Option to track delivery personnel

Conclusion:

By this way, Agile framework is helping small companies and startups to scale and deliver minimum value product for each iteration. Zomato’s Engineering team is adding more and more increments based on product backlogs added by product owners/ product managers based on user feedback.

This incremental and iterative way of delivering product services in market is helping zomato to withstand tight competition with Swiggy.