My journey at Mercadona Tech as a Backend Developer
About the beginnings, lessons learned, and impostor syndrome. I’m a Backend Developer at Mercadona Tech and I’m passionate about building products with real impact in cross-functional teams where everyone’s committed to delivering value without compromising excellence.
Intro
Hello! I am Xavi, Backend Developer at Mercadona Tech. I have been part of the company for almost two years, and since then, I have had the opportunity to go through several teams (three, to be accurate), and I come to tell you about part of my journey here so you can see what we do in our day to day and how we work.
Journey
I got employed in Mercadona Tech in January 2020. I was super nervous. It was the first time I worked with a big team, I had never worked with Python, and I did not know well what to expect or how I could contribute. A tricky combination of stress and our beloved impostor syndrome, huh?
The good thing? That feeling didn’t last a week! After overcoming the first days and doing the corresponding onboarding, I felt less lost, my mission was clear, and I began to understand how ambitious Mercadona Tech’s goals were.
In addition, my team transmitted to me from the first moment that the stack is something I can learn that they were going to help me and answer any questions I might have.
After months working in Supply vertical, I switched to the Picking team (order preparation). There began a new stage and a considerable challenge. Picking has an incredible impact on thousands of workers who dedicate their time to prepare our customers’ orders. Any incident can block the hive functioning and cause a cascade effect that causes delays in all our deliveries.(we prepare more than 7,000 orders per day).
In addition, Picking is the oldest project within the logistics projects, and it used to be a massive monolith from where everything was managed (even Supply). Hence, there were still traces of old code and a lot of technical debt dragging us back in the day. We developed a plan to tackle this technical debt by identifying the most painful points and integrating them into our sprints.
Thanks to the entire team’s commitment, we reduced this technical debt by a very high percentage, and our day-to-day improved drastically.
In this team, I learned a lot. To highlight the most important:
- responsibility of having such a vast impact on the users,
- incidents management,
- parallel changes making to maintain backward compatibility with our different clients,
- analysis of the team’s KPIs to understand when what we were doing could add value or when it was not worth it,
- analysis of the points of improvement, based directly on the feedback from our users (picking errors, quantity errors),
- having a significant and direct impact on our products and learning to solve problems with our customers at the center
After this stage in Picking, we created a new team (NTC) dedicated to taking our solution (both e-commerce and logistics) to the rest of Spain. Until now, we worked in a very controlled and exclusive environment for us: the hives. Directly, to reach all of Spain, we had to do it from Mercadona’s stores. I’m still working on the in-store picking part, but here the big challenge is a different one: we don’t have hundreds of employees preparing simultaneously in a single hive. We have two or three people in each store, but we intend to reach more than 700 stores. It’s an incredible scalability challenge at all levels. The problems and the focus of everything change radically with this new scenario and the potential impact on the company. We not only impact ourselves as Mercadona Tech but also physical stores, physical customers, and our colleagues.
Conclusions
Why have I told you about my journey at Mercadona Tech? Months after joining, I realized that from the outside, I had no context of what was done within the company beyond e-commerce. When I started thinking about how to approach this post, I wanted to share a real example of some of the challenges we face every day. I hope now you can better understand what we do and better identify if you would be interested in being part of the team.
Come! We need you!
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