Gousto and PagerDuty partner to handle soaring demand for services in 2020

Gousto’s customers can order recipe boxes containing precise ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes for over 50 weekly dishes via its website and mobile app. Gousto has experienced rapid growth in recent years and as the UK went into lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19, demand for Gousto’s services rose further still. 

Daily website traffic surged to 10 times normal levels and this year, monthly meal orders have doubled from 2.5m to 5m. Gousto needed to rapidly scale technical support for its always-on digital platform - minimising downtime and improving incident response.

Shaun Pearce, Chief Technology Officer at Gousto comments, “We had been managing incidents based on manual communication, individuals’ domain knowledge and their willingness to be available out of hours. The process worked but it didn’t scale well. Also, time to resolution was often higher than we would have liked because some incidents went undetected. We needed a way to identify and address incidents before customers were impacted.”

In early 2020 Gousto set about reviewing its incident response process across all systems and domains. As the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, Gousto brought forward a planned implementation of a digital operations management solution from PagerDuty so that the organisation would be well placed to cope with the increased demand on its services. With PagerDuty, Gousto can identify incidents earlier, understand potential impact on customer experience and automate the entire incident response process. 

PagerDuty also helps Gousto manage incidents when lockdown measures mean developer squads are no longer able to gather in a physical war-room to triage issues. 

Shaun Pearce continues, “An immediate benefit of the platform has been to make squads more accountable for the services and products they support. This removes ownership issues and subsequent stress because individuals know exactly what they are responsible for. When an incident is triggered in PagerDuty, it is automatically directed to the right person – along with all the information they need. Others are kept informed as required.”  

By automating digital operations management Gousto has enabled new, more distributed, ways of working and has created playbooks and a new model for out of hours support. 

PagerDuty gives Gousto clear, actionable insight into the health of its digital services. Data relating to incidents across different parts of the organisation will help Gousto identify areas for improvement and where best to direct its resources for future growth.

Gousto recently announced it has become only the 4th UK company in 2020 to reach ‘Tech Unicorn’ status. It plans to at least triple capacity by 2022, with the opening of three new customer fulfilment centres and the creation of 1,000 new jobs.