My learnings from Feeding India

Leading engineering at Feeding India taught me that successful business strategy isn’t just about spreadsheets and forecasts—it’s about creativity, problem-solving, iterative experiments, and building sustainable systems that amplify both social impact and commercial success. At Feeding India, our obsession was deeply understanding and addressing the real-world problems of our "customers": the NGOs (schools) we provided meals to, the meal vendors supplying the food to these NGOs, and most importantly, the students benefiting from these programs.

Joining Feeding India in November 2022 as the first engineering lead was both challenging and rewarding. Our mission was urgent and clear: use data and technology to ensure no child goes hungry by optimizing meal distribution across our affiliated NGO network. Initially, with just one full-time engineer and a limited budget, the constraints felt tight—but they also became our biggest advantage.

Key Lessons Learned

Lesson 1: Resource Constraints Breed Innovation

At Zomato, initiating new projects, hiring for them, infra provisioning, or campaigns—was as simple as submitting a request to the stake holders. However, at Feeding India, every rupee mattered. We initially relied on third-party integrations for essential operations like identity verification, SMS verification, and email communications.

We soon realized the entire NGO partnership lifecycle could be digitized, significantly reducing data discrepancies and redundant processes. By renegotiating vendor contracts and leveraging open-source solutions instead of costly proprietary software, we streamlined our workflows without sacrificing quality.

Takeaway: Constraints aren't roadblocks; they're guardrails that drive creative, efficient, and impactful solutions.

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: Embed yourself in your users’ environment. Real-world insights uncover problems—and solutions—that numbers alone can't.

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, rapid tests and iterations lead to faster improvement. Quick, data-driven adjustments consistently outperform rigid, long-term plans.

The lessons from Feeding India significantly influenced my approach at Zomato:

• Cost Efficiency: We rewrote and even open-sourced PDF generation services, reducing costs by 90%.
• Cross-Functional Teams: Adopted the concept of volunteer "tech champions," fostering domain expertise and self-organizing teams around critical metrics.
• Micro-frontend Architecture: Successfully piloted incremental rollouts in peripheral markets, avoiding expensive production reworks.

Feeding India taught me that effective strategy must combine adaptability, empathy, and resourcefulness. Whether you're providing meals to children or serving millions through an app, these principles hold true: innovate within your means, center your approach on real human needs, iterate quickly, and create resilient systems that transcend individual leadership.

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