we have met in the prev interview as well

I am meeting Geetanjali for the first time .

I will take few minutes to introduce myself.
I am Akshi Sharma I am currently working as amazon as PL in Amazon business
technologies team serving the core ecommerce domain .I have tech background
graduating in cse with a rich exp
I am always keen to learn and recently I have completed one year executive
program from IIm Indore in program and project management and passed it with
the highest grading.

Today we are going to discuss online grocery delivery business customer places an
order on app ,company receives the order the order delivery boy would collect
and deliver it on cx doorsteps.
But In every market ,in every sector ,sometimes is always untapped.
For example when there were multiple online grocery apps in the market
There was untapped want of people of their impatience .
Zepto took advantage of that and we introduced the notion of 10 min delivery
system. And established ist whole business with the help of our dark store model
and PPB formula picking packing bagging in 60 seconds. And rev the market with
this new concept
Dark stores are their mini warehouses where they stock their products and are
located within 2-3 kms radius of customers
.We are hyper focused on speed.
If Zepto is doing so good why are we talking about
But why re we talking about Blinkit today.
Before disusing about the current scenario and lets rewind a little bit and dis cuss
the pre covid scenario.
They set up their own warehouses in metro cities which gave them 3 super
powers
A Super inventory—As grofers is a technology business they have data from
which they know what products cx order and what products cx don’t usually
order hence they can stock up their best selling products
Stock able items- Keep only those items which can be stored for long.This resulted
in low storage cost.
Good margins – there were 2 reasons now there is no middle men involved so
margins are higher as compared to if they have a middle men
And keeping private label products which gave them higher margin.

Zomato invested 700 billion dollars in it .

And now.
There are a lot of other market players in this domain of grocery delivery like
Instamart by Swingy bb daily,big baskety and Blinkit have also started shifting to
10 min delivery model.
have also started shifting to 10 min delivery model.

The competition is market is so big and this market can be won by just pouring in
money into the market .
If u ask me the one company that has been very lucky and worked hard equally to
back investment always at the right time is Blinkit.

Why is it even a challenge for us?

There are 3 major threats to us

 1) Value addition Services as companies like Swiggy,Big basket and Blinkit
offer additional services apart from grocery delivery. like swigy also have
food delivery, and if Blinkit ,merges into the Zomato app it will be single
stop shop for the customers thus offering the customers with a lot more
than what we are offering .
I have raised this as a problem business level for me as PM whatever task is given
to me whatever program and product I am designing I have to build them wirh
some extensibility in mind if the company ventures that domain in future we
don’t have to entire reqork.
Also as a employee doing best work for the company would ensure better
outcome for the product and thus more attract more investors.
2)They don’t lack funding at all . Plus sales volume of these companies are very
high because they have multiple operations running
all these things give the power of cash discounting to these companies like they
have so much cash that they can purchase the whole inventory at a discounted
price thus increasing their profit margins and they could then afford to give
customer better deals and discounts.
3)
How to scale: if I want to scale to any new city I need to onboard more stores
more delivery partners, and would receive more customer request on my
application and that would require us to scale our tech infra .As u know building
a application for 10,000 orders is entirely different from building for 1 million
orders. Scale matters a lot for tech design . For Blinkit it it is very easy to do that
they are backed by Zomato which is already working at that scale at pan India
level. Zomato can share their Tech learning ,s resources, exp to build the tech
infra for Blinkit. On contrast if Zept has to scale up, we need to hire new
resources, train them, build services and then learn from failures. This way Blinkit
can scale faster than us in acquiring new market areas.

As a goal, thus if we have to acquire larger market share we have to match the
rate of scale of Blinkit.
How would we do it ????

Proper hiring :
Experienced folks vs college hires. (Referrals play a lot here).
You do not want to hire someone and train them for 6 months after which they
are only being productive.
SOP efficient:
Business & engineering processes should be minimal and efficient like
1) Expanding to new cities should be easily configurable in our tech systems
with minimal/ ideally no code changes (except new features).
2) if we are onboarding a new kiryana store, we should have minimal
onboarding process for store owners requiring bare minimal steps enabling
us to scale better.
Extensible:
While designing products and coming up with processes, we should keep future
extension in mind with dimensions like scale, new use cases etc but we should do
this not sacrificing existing delivery at hand.
How to manage in resource crunch ?
1) Identifying key feature deliverable with maximum ROI.
2) Optimising the use of resources according to skill set and projects
requirement.
3) Making best use of time for SDEs so that they can focus on coding without
worrying about business and product.

I will rewind back a little bit lets see what we were discussing .
We are comparing Blinkit with zepto across various dimensions and trying to
gather improvement areas for us
We prev covered market economic scenarios now we are going to cover 2 more
scenarios dimensions and product:

Lets start with hyd as an example and o and discuss the business strategy
Customer demographics
In the interest of time I have used recent govt surveys but ideally we should rely
on similar product surveys for better reliability.

Out of urban population there are 2 set of customers

Families and millinela

One et of cutomer I Millineals –student ho live in pg they usually place mall
order size
Families and young corporate couple ho work 9 to 6 and come home at 8 who
don’t have time to go to grocery store their orders are big and they order
frequently and hence more profitability
So their real customer from whom they can profit all live in urban areas and
residential society

Lets take an example of are anamed kokapet in hyd .

I just posted a google map screenshot here u can see there a lot of residential
societies in this area and to my surprise zepto does not serve in this area
This is a missed opp

I would quote as Indian customers are the most pampered customers.They need
the best of prices with no additional costs this brings us to the famous topic of
discounts
We know that both Zepto and Blinkit offer good amount of discounts and there is
no clear winner sfor now. If u see their user interface as a product
U can clearly see the focus difference between
The first thing when u say is Blinkit app is D D D
On contract when u open z app the first thing u see is 10 min delivery.
I as a customer can tolerate 20 min delivery but I will prefer a provider who gives
me additional 10 discount with free delivery.

Coming to the point of delivery

For this we need to make our processes

Blinkit is one of the largest company targeting this huge marketplace which we
have not yet explored .Penetrating this market later would be difficult because
Blinkit had already gained customer trust by that time and customer behaviour
would have been set by using blinkiyt for so long

Replacement ia very critical factor I as indian customer have guest at home and
want something very urgently without caring about refunds or anything

Through this becau

This builds trust with customer like TATA Indian market because of its social
welfare in
At a high level I actually made a brief comp on various other dimensions as well

Our target audience is unique, so should be our marketing and advertising

strategies. Direct ad mechanisms like youtube skippable ads and ad banners are
more of a menance which people skip and move ahead. Also with current
scenario where youtube show repetitive ads, viewers attach a negative feeling
with the brand interfering & disturbing with normal watch time. Instead we
should leverage channels like TVF, Filtercopy, which have huge watch audience
including our target audience of working population. Our ad strategy should have
two dimensions
1) Leveraging social media influencers more & more
2) Advertising the brand as a key part of life of characters in web series

3)
Greek yogurt brand Epigamia and Zoomcar team up a channel to reach
Millennials through comedy web series "What The Folks!"

 Nikhil, the main character is a big fan of Epigamia Greek Yogurt and
introduces it to the rest of the family.

The brand and its key values were tastefully integrated in every episode of
the series

brands will be getting presence

increase in brand search traffic, website traffic, app downloads, increase in time spent on app,

how much time your users are spending in your app per individual session.
Acquisitions represent the number of users who download and install your app
from a certain location, paid campaigns or in-app referrals. This metric is
especially important to track when you run campaigns through paid partners like
Facebook to promote app downloads.
Retention is measured as the percentage of users who return to your app
Analyzing retention allows you to determine what’s working and what isn’t in
your app over time as updates occur. If you released a new version, one of the
first things you should identify is whether or not your retention has changed. 

So, we have lots of challenges we discussed above, which we want to solve for. I
would discuss a generic approach we need to follow for overcoming each of these
challenges.

Accept the problem. This is a principal which applies to individuals & Businesses
equally, that unless we accept a problem, we cannot improve ourselves. Many
companies (or individuals for that matter) are blind sided to their short comings
just like the case of Nokia, it did not change with market demand of Smart Phones
and in no time they were out of the market. I guess case studies like these is the
first step in accepting our short cm=omings.

Having a data driven approach based on key customer metrics is the key to
identify the root cause. Why is this important because it will help us track if our
solutions are helping is if we track them against these metrics.

Identifying product gaps like:

 Technical:
• Software Bug - Bugs are preventing proper usage
• Crashing pages - Pages are crashing due to various reasons - over
consumption of memory etc.
• Performance Issues - Latency – Yes
• Have we made any recent UI changes on our app?
Business:
 If better price is being offered by competitors
 If better service in terms of product quality is being offered by competitors
 Value added services being offered by competitors.
Understanding problem demographics:
 Regionals – specific areas/countries/cities
 Specific gender/age/user segment
 Seasonal issues – during specific times/events/festivals.
Direct customer feedbacks:
 In-app reviews and customer complaints.
 Social media complaints/reviews on Fb/You-tube/linked-In.
 Public surveys

We have already discussed some of the solutions before and we are consolidating
them here in this slide.

As we discussed earlier, we would have less resources compared with our

competitors, it is very critical for us to develop the skills of working under
constrained resource.
We have a lot of possible solutions for us but implementing all of those at the
same time will not be feasible, so we would have to determine our priorties so
that we have clear vision on what problems are we solving.

For priority, I wanted to identify it using two dimensions, critical and low hanging.
Critical are those which are must haves for us. Low Hanings are the ones with
maximum ROI with minimal effort and can be easily implemented.

Building a brand identity is low hanging because it is bound to succeed as it is

already tested by other brands as we discussed in EPIGAMIA/ZOOM case studies.
Also for it we would leverage existing platforms like Youtube with no tech
/product effort required. Also it increases our customer reach make our product
an important part of customer life.

These product improvements are low hanging because we already have an

ordering service in place which we can leverage in both these use-case. For
replacements we just need to trigger the same order again. For daily
subscriptions, we just need to trigger the same order daily automatically using the
same order service. There will be some tech effort required to trigger these
new/daily orders but it wont be as much as we did while we created the ordering
service. Also, it would bring additional revenue source for us and create additional
value for our customers.