Picnic, the Amsterdam-based online grocery service, operates a unique hybrid business model that combines digital technology with physical operations. With thousands of delivery vehicles, multiple warehouses, and a complex supply chain, Picnic needed a robust incident management solution that could bridge the gap between their tech teams and operational staff.
After implementing incident.io, Picnic has transformed their incident response process, achieving faster resolution times, better cross-functional collaboration, and a significant reduction in customer-impacting incidents. Their journey reveals how a unified incident management platform helped them build a foundation for technical resilience that supports their mission of making grocery shopping "simple, fun, and affordable."
Running tech, especially in such a hybrid business, is a very complex business. We have put a lot of effort over the last years to really understand how we can reliably run our supply chain and reliably serve millions of customers. We were looking for a tool and an entire environment that allows us to operate in our live way.
Daniel, CTO of Picnic
About Picnic
Picnic is a fast-growing online grocery delivery service with a simple mission: to make grocery shopping simple, fun, and affordable. Unlike traditional e-commerce companies, Picnic operates a hybrid business model that combines cutting-edge digital technology with a complex physical operation.
Their service relies on a network of warehouses, a fleet of delivery vehicles, and sophisticated logistics planning to ensure fresh groceries reach customers efficiently. This combination of digital and physical operations creates unique challenges when it comes to incident management and system reliability.
Life before incident.io
Prior to adopting incident.io, Picnic were manageing a fragmented incident management process and tools that weren't fully meeting their needs.
"We did have an on-call solution, but this was disconnected from our incident tool. All the incidents were created manually," explains Paulo, a tech analyst at Picnic who runs strategic projects across their tech organization.
The disconnect between their on-call solution and incident management tool led to inefficiencies and a lack of standardization. Individual teams began developing their own solutions, creating further fragmentation.
"Picnic teams started to develop their own tools or their own Slack workflows because they weren't happy with the tool. They wanted to see different features," Paulo continues.
For a business that relies on delivering fresh groceries to customers on tight schedules, any incident can have cascading effects across their entire operation.
"It can be a real big rollover if incidents are not solved on time," says Jenaro, a supervisor on Picnic's planning team who ensures operations within their fulfilment centres run smoothly.
The company recognized that to scale effectively, they needed a unified approach to incident management—one that could connect their technical and operational teams while providing the insights needed to prevent future incidents.
The search for a better solution
A few years ago, Picnic shifted their focus to developer experience and system reliability after successfully building out their core systems.
"We actually focused on developer experience after we figured out how to build the systems. We were focusing on how to run in a reliable, stable way, which means for us mainly three things: How do we handle incidents? How do we learn from incidents? And how do we prevent future incidents?" explains Daniel, CTO of Picnic.
This focus led them to search for a comprehensive incident management solution that could support their hybrid business model and connect their technical and operational teams.
Why Picnic chose incident.io
Picnic needed a solution that could unify their incident response process across both technical and operational teams. incident.io's platform offered the integration capabilities and user-friendly experience they were looking for.
"Having good cooperation between the tech teams and the business teams during incidents is vital for us. In many cases, or in most cases, a tech incident will not just remain in tech but will also have repercussions on our operational site or our commercial site," says Marc, domain lead for operations at Picnic.
incident.io's ability to bring cross-functional teams together in a single platform was a significant factor in Picnic's decision.
Implementation and adoption
Picnic took a methodical approach to rolling out incident.io across their organization, starting with their tech teams and gradually expanding to operational and business units.
"The rolling out was very smooth. We basically onboarded one team every week. In total, it took us two quarters to fully onboard tech," explains Paulo. "We made it as easy as possible, where we also built a redirection from our initial tool directly to incident.io."
This phased approach allowed Picnic to refine their processes as they went and ensured high adoption rates across the organization.
We fully deployed incident.io across all the tech teams, we have operational teams using it, and now also the first business teams. It fully replaced our own internal tool, but also we use incident.io On-call, so that replaced PagerDuty for us. Now there's also a direct connection between the incidents being created, the escalations, and also the alerts coming in to incident.io.
Paulo, Tech Analyst at Picnic
Key features and benefits
Unified incident management
incident.io has provided Picnic with a single platform where technical and operational teams can collaborate during incidents, leading to faster resolution times and better outcomes.
"If we have one incident that's really impacting us, we are involving tech, and maybe engineering leadership. With the three of us, we're looking for the right solutions. When we're not fully operational, then we use incident.io and involve everybody to solve the incident," explains Jenaro.
Comprehensive incident visibility
With incident.io, Picnic now has complete visibility into all ongoing incidents across their organization, allowing for better resource allocation and prioritization.
"We now have a complete overview of all the incidents that are going on," says Daniel. This visibility has been crucial for managing the complex interplay between their digital systems and physical operations.
Automated post-incident workflows
incident.io's automation capabilities have streamlined Picnic's post-incident processes, improving the quality and consistency of their follow-up actions.
"All the post-incident flow is automated as much as possible. This also really helps with the experience, because especially the developers never really like to write the incident report or do the follow-up tickets, which are crucial for us to learn from the incident," says Paulo.
The three phases of impact
Picnic has experienced three distinct phases of improvement since implementing incident.io, each building on the last to create a more resilient operation.
"We went through three major phases," explains Daniel. "In the first one, we saw that incident handling went faster, more reliable, and actually we could handle incidents with more confidence. Number two is actually the number of incidents reduced. Also, the handling and the reliability of mitigation of incident impact improved."
1. Faster, more reliable incident handling
The immediate benefit Picnic experienced was an improvement in their incident response process. incident.io provided the structure and tools needed to manage incidents more efficiently.
"incident.io is making it much easier to have the incidents solved and have the incident in one overview," says Jenaro.
2. Reduction in incident frequency and impact
As Picnic continued to use incident.io, they saw a decrease in the number of incidents occurring and an improvement in their ability to mitigate the impact of those that did occur.
"We can already see the benefits of this. We have a higher adoption and a faster execution," notes Marc.
3. Building technical resilience
Picnic is now entering the third phase of their incident management journey: building structural technical resilience to prevent customer-impacting incidents altogether.
We are now moving to a level where we are building up structural technical resilience, meaning whenever there's an incident that's happening, there's no longer customers affected, and that is basically the ultimate end goal that we are striving for. Daniel, CTO of Picnic
Looking ahead
Picnic continues to expand their use of incident.io across their organization, bringing more operational and business teams onto the platform. As they grow, they're focused on using the insights gained from incident.io to build ever-greater resilience into their systems.
Their journey demonstrates how a thoughtful approach to incident management can transform not just how a company responds to issues, but how they prevent them from affecting customers in the first place—a critical capability for a hybrid business that bridges the digital and physical worlds.
By unifying their incident response process with incident.io, Picnic has built a foundation for reliable operations that supports their mission of delivering a simple, fun, and affordable grocery shopping experience to millions of customers.
