The Garden: Instacart’s Physical Staging Environment

We move at an extraordinary pace at Instacart. In order to release new versions of our products multiple times a day, we need a testing infrastructure that can keep up.

Testing our product end-to-end is extremely difficult though because our service has to handle pretty complex transactions in the physical world. It became clear to us: in order to roll out features confidently, we need to be testing at real physical grocery stores.

However, driving to the grocery store is a pain! Just as Instacart solves this pain for our customers, The Garden solves this pain for our engineering, product & design teams.

When a staging server is not enough, engineers use The Garden. The Garden is a replica of a typical grocery store inside of Instacart’s San Francisco office. We use this space to simulate orders and to mimic the conditions of a real grocery store. Spill on aisle 6? Carts in your way? No cell service? We can test any scenario imaginable.

How we built it

At a recent company hackathon, a team formed around the idea of building a grocery store in our office. The hackathon was a mere 48 hours long, making a project of this scale a bold proposition (exactly the kind of challenge we like 😉).

On the first day of the hackathon we ordered shelving and had them delivered the next day. We ordered fake food online, and ordered real boxed and canned items for delivery to the office via Instacart. We inventoried all of the items and created a digital storefront available on instacart.com for employees only. We set it up in our Shopper app too so that we could play the role of a Personal Shopper fulfilling an order!

In practice, we use The Garden every day to test new releases, new ideas and new processes and procedures before we test them with our retailer partners. The Garden also allows us to rapidly test experimental features, for example:

• creating 3D GPS-style maps of products in a retail store
• evaluating the quality of barcode scanning algorithms under difficult lighting conditions (on an assortment of test devices)
• building new technology, processes and workflows for Shoppers, and then inviting them to try the new tech in a safe space
• Testing new apps we’re working on for Customers and performing user research studies

For us, The Garden has become a physical staging server. We can deploy new ideas both digitally and physically to run tests. We can simulate a number of scenarios which would be impossible to do in production. And most importantly, we can move at Instacart speed!