Grocery TV Innovation, Technology & Agility

What defines your engineering team’s approach to product development? 

Our approach to development as a team starts with collaboration. Whether we’re designing new system architecture or reviewing our ways of working, everyone is involved in the conversation. In many teams, it’s often easy for more junior engineers to feel like they shouldn’t state their opinions and should instead simply nod at what more senior engineers say. I think that an open and collaborative approach fosters faster growth for junior engineers and helps the senior engineers on our team ensure they’re thinking about things the right way and articulating their vision for projects properly.

Tell me about a time when you and your teammates banded together to take a tricky project across the finish line. 

Earlier this year, we had to make a fundamental change to a core component of our data model to support GTV’s future vision. This change impacted most of our applications at each one’s foundation, as we were changing a core component of our business logic. It also represented immense risk in that it would require all of the updates to our system to be deployed simultaneously. 

The team met the challenge with tenacity and grace. Both our engineering and data teams worked diligently to ensure we accounted for all dependencies. Throughout the project, the team ensured that they kept one another up to date on any design changes that popped up throughout development. 

I’m proud to say that the final deployment rolled out across our entire tech stack smoothly and without regression. That speaks to the incredible people on our team, and I’m thankful every day to get to work with them.
 

What’s unique about your engineering team, and how does this influence the way you all accomplish your work? 

As an engineering team, we have an incredibly unique combination of strong individual ownership and collaboration. Due to the nature of our business, our tech stack has a wide scope in the functions that it covers. We build software that runs on physical devices, but we also build high-scale back-end applications that have drastically different needs and requirements. 

The result of this on the team structure level is that everyone gets to be an expert in their own space. Engineers on our team get to maintain strong ownership over the applications they’re responsible for. In tandem with this, we still do a significant portion of our upfront design with people across the team. This means that when we’re developing a design for a new project in any space, we’re always getting diverse perspectives and ways of looking at the problem we’re trying to solve. 

What tools do you use to minimize chaos in your day-to-day work? 

At Grocery TV, we try to keep the chaos in check with two main approaches: tackling informational chaos and managing executional chaos. For informational chaos, we lean on a mix of tools to stay organized and informed. We use Gong, Google Meet recordings, a custom GPT and Notion to capture and structure all the insights flying around. Notion acts as our living knowledge base — it’s super searchable — and with Notion AI, we can quickly spin up first drafts of product requirements documents. As we’re having more and more conversations with customers, we’re also looking into tools like Productbot to take insight analysis to the next level.

When it comes to executional chaos, we make sure there’s a clear line between big-picture product goals and the nitty gritty of delivery tasks. Our Notion roadmap is tightly integrated with Linear, so every initiative in Notion maps directly to projects and issues in Linear. This way, everything we deliver ties back to a strategic goal. On top of that, we’ve built processes that prioritize transparency and regular feedback loops, which helps us minimize friction and keep our roadmap flexible as the team’s needs evolve.

How has your toolkit allowed you to level up at Grocery TV? What important tasks are you able to accomplish by automating some of the more tedious processes?

By automating knowledge capture and connecting each product initiative to clear ownership, I’ve been able to deepen my expertise and build stronger relationships with development teams. The Notion knowledge base not only accelerates my understanding of our company, industry and customers but also allows me to embed crucial context directly into product documents. This helps the entire team make more informed decisions. Meanwhile, the Notion-to-Linear delivery chain clarifies boundaries between product, engineering and data, ensuring everyone knows who’s responsible for what. This transparency reduces back-and-forth, so we can focus on higher-impact work.

What is one tip you would share with a new product manager who is trying to minimize chaos on their team?

Document everything — context, decisions, meeting outcomes — in one central place. Chaos tends to creep in when people are out of sync or when key information gets lost in the shuffle. Having a single source of truth helps keep everyone on the same page, reduces misunderstandings and cuts down on unnecessary rework. Over time, this habit saves a ton of time, clears up confusion and keeps the team aligned on what you’re building and, more importantly, why you’re building it. It’s one of those simple things that makes a huge difference in keeping things running smoothly.