Bringing order to parties: How Swiggy built the Group Ordering feature

Here’s how a group of Swiggsters came together to build a feature that makes ordering at parties fun!

Necessity is the mother of all inventions, yes. But sometimes annoyance is a better inspiration and Balvinder Gambhir, a Swiggy SDE II knows this best. Balvinder loves watching videos from a comedy group and on the day of a Swiggy Hackathon he decided to watch an old video. He was mildly annoyed with how one of the character’s friends kept interrupting him with their constant orders. And that was enough for him to build a working proof of concept (POC) in two days and present it during the Hackathon. 

TL;DR. This was how Swiggy’s latest feature Group Ordering was born. 

Chaotic beginnings

Armed with his idea, Balvinder went to the Hackathon with the confidence that it would make a dent. “And then… I lost,” he says, unable to stop himself from laughing. Despite not winning the hackathon, Balvinder’s idea still won a lot of interest. “The product team looked at the idea and decided to build on this in December of 2023,” adds Balvinder who participated solo in this hackathon. 

Once the team picked up Balvider’s idea, it rolled out fast. Speaking about why they chose to build this product, Aditya Narayanan, senior product manager says, “We’ve all experienced the frustration of having our order mixed up at a party, leaving us to make do with whatever is available. It’s a significant responsibility for the host to ensure everyone is well-fed, which can be quite stressful and we want parties to be fun for everyone including the host! 

So we went about talking to and understanding how users place their party orders. It was here that we identified a recurring issue: Ordering for a group often leads to mistakes and is a cause of stress for the host. So it strengthened our need to build this product ASAP.”

Antidote to chaos

With every great idea comes great challenges and it wasn’t any different here. “What Balvinder built was an offline POC, when we discussed it with the entire team we decided to build this on a much larger scale so there would be many more use cases. Earlier, it worked for people who were in the same room and connected to a single network, now people from different cities can place a group order together and this process took a major chunk of our time,” says Swapnil Jaiswal, SDEII who helped build the product. 

But it wasn’t just this, Darshil Agarwal, an SDE II at Swiggy, says, “When Balvinder built this product, he initially made it for an android platform. We wanted it to be platform agnostic where it would work across multiple platforms, which means that people from different software could place an order together. When we got to building this feature we had to build tools from scratch and so we got the backend team involved in this and built an entire backend system to handle the data. Post that we built QR codes and links to be shared, we then thought of several thousand edge cases that were possible and worked on solving them. 

Planning a party is not an easy task, while solving for this, Swapnil and Darshil realised that solving for it was not a walk in the park either. “We wanted to solve the chaos, but while testing the product we realised that it was more chaotic than ever. For instance, if the host is placing an order that has the right to update the order, we wanted to make that smooth for them without causing double work. The other thing we had to make sure was that order syncing was happening on time and together. We didn’t want orders to get lost when another person added their items to the cart. So, Dheeraj Kathuria, SDE II built the whole ICP flow,” Swapnil adds. 

Since the team did not add a limit on the number of people placing an order at the same time or the cart order, “Nikhil Meena, SDE III, from the checkout team played a big role here,” he adds. “They had to make sure their systems were scalable to support these orders in the backend system to maintain the data.”

Once these initial hiccups were addressed, Darshil and Swapnil felt confident about the product. But that was about to be tested along with their will. “On the scalability side, we were excited to show the feature to people. Before every feature release we have a bug bash where we stress test it. Around 18 people were trying to place an order and it… failed! There were so many bugs being raised, the system began crashing and it was a mess. It felt like we lost,” says Darshil.

But there wasn’t much time to waste, Darshil, Swapnil and Vishnu Raju (SDE at Swiggy) along with Nikhil Meena got together and worked on solving this in the next few hours. “The very next day we had another bug bash and guess what? We passed!” adds Darshil who also ordered 18 subs to test out the group order feature when his team was at the Swiggy HQ during the Jamboree. 

As the product was ready to be released, Parth Nigam, GM product marketing’s team stepped in. “We knew we had a great product to show but we were apprehensive for a bunch of reasons. In the 10 years of Swiggy we never introduced such a feature for our users and they were only used to placing an order on a single phone at a time. So we were nervous if users would accept this feature. It was a whole new mental model,” says Parth.

But with the launch of the product, Parth and the rest of the team’s fears were laid to rest. “The adoption rate on the first day was really good. For instance,one group order had 72 items with an average order value of over INR14,000. This order had 35 burgers, 35 samosas and two laddoos!” adds Parth.

Parties are meant to be a lot of fun, but there’s usually some chaos. With this new feature, there’s just order, order, (group) order.