Space, Time and Groceries – tech-at-instacart

How do we bring order to the chaos? In the remainder of this post, we'll first introduce the logistics problem Instacart is solving, outline the architecture of our systems and describe the GPS data we collect. Visualizations like these help us to build intuition about our system, generate hypotheses for improvements, sanity check our changes, identify best practices and improve our operations. But before we get too caught up in these visualizations, let's first quickly cover the problem we are solving. When using our app to order groceries, you first choose a retailer, and then shop for groceries to be delivered.