Case Study: Ocado Technology achieves faster releases and greater transparency with Slack

Shipping new releases and your groceries faster

Ocado is a leading online supermarket and technology company that serves over 70% of UK households and handles more than 200,000 orders per week. Its Ocado Technology division—responsible for the Ocado Smart Platform and advances in robotics, machine learning and cloud services—grew rapidly to more than 1,000 engineers across the UK, Poland, Bulgaria and Spain, creating communication challenges: email and scheduled video calls couldn’t support the spontaneous collaboration needed, and centralised teams became bottlenecks for deployments.

Ocado adopted Slack (moving from a free trial to Slack Pro) and integrated it into DevOps using Slack’s API and tools like PagerDuty, Google Drive and Calendar, giving teams real‑time visibility into deployments and incidents. The result was faster, more accurate releases, vastly reduced internal email, easier cross‑office collaboration and better incident analysis—benefits that were quickly embraced across the technology division with no formal training.

Ocado Technology

Clifford Bailey

Head of Ocado Technology