My learnings from Feeding India

What leading the engineering at an NGO taught me about strategy.

Apr 23, 2025

Leading engineering at Feeding India taught me that strategy is not just spreadsheets and forecasts. It is also creativity, problem-solving, small experiments, and systems that keep working under constraints. At Feeding India, our "customers" were the NGOs and schools we provided meals to, the vendors supplying the food, and most importantly, the students eating those meals.

Joining Feeding India in November 2022 as the first engineering lead was both challenging and rewarding. The mission was urgent and clear: use data and technology to optimize meal distribution across our NGO network. We had one full-time engineer and a limited budget. The constraints felt tight, but they became our biggest advantage.

Key Lessons Learned

Lesson 1: Constraints Force Cleaner Choices

At Zomato, starting a project, hiring for it, provisioning infra, or launching a campaign usually meant submitting the right request. At Feeding India, every rupee mattered. We initially relied on third-party integrations for identity verification, SMS verification, and email communication.

We soon realized the NGO partnership lifecycle could be digitized, reducing data discrepancies and repeated manual work. By renegotiating vendor contracts and using open-source solutions where they fit, we simplified workflows without paying for software we did not need.

Takeaway: Constraints are not only roadblocks. They force cleaner choices.

Lesson 2: Obsess Over the Customer (Even If They’re Not Paying)

Our "customers" at Feeding India, underprivileged children and NGOs, weren’t paying us directly, but their experience was paramount. True understanding required empathy and firsthand observation, not just surveys or calls.

Spending weekends on-site at meal distributions revealed painful inefficiencies. For instance, our initial third-party face based attendance system took about 8 seconds per child, resulting in nearly half an hour of waiting for a school of 200 kids, particularly difficult in India's harsh summers. Recognizing this unacceptable latency, we brought the solution entirely in-house, significantly improving performance and ensuring better control for troubleshooting. Our in house solution takes under 2 seconds in recognising a child (as opposed to the 8 seconds by the third-party system). This felt insanely fast. The fastest attendance recorded was under 400ms.

Takeaway: Sit where the work happens. Numbers alone would not have shown us the cost of those 8 seconds.

Lesson 3: Iterate Fast, Then Faster

Limited resources made it impossible to invest months into solutions without testing their effectiveness. We adopted a "pilot and pivot" strategy, rapidly launching minimal versions, gathering feedback, and improving continuously.

Our facial recognition system began as a basic prototype tested within our office. After initial testing with a partner NGO, we scaled incrementally, continuously benchmarking our system against third-party solutions. This agile approach reduced error rates by 60% in just five short development cycles. Today, our model automatically updates monthly without any human intervention.

Takeaway: Small tests helped us improve faster than a long, rigid plan would have.

The lessons from Feeding India influenced my approach at Zomato. We rewrote and open-sourced PDF generation services, reducing costs by 90%. We adopted volunteer "tech champions" to build domain expertise around critical metrics. We also piloted incremental micro-frontend rollouts in peripheral markets, avoiding expensive production reworks.

Feeding India taught me that effective strategy needs adaptability, empathy, and resourcefulness. Whether you are providing meals to children or serving millions through an app, the pattern holds: work within your means, stay close to real human needs, iterate quickly, and build systems that survive individual leadership changes.

If you've experienced similar lessons in a nonprofit or startup context, I'd love to hear what strategies worked for you!