Razorpay Aug 5, 2021

Behind The Scenes: Crafting Razorpay's new mobile app

Article Summary

Chaitanya Deorukhkar from Razorpay reveals how his team built and shipped a production mobile app while simultaneously engineering their own culture. The entire team took a week-long vacation the day after launch—with zero P0 incidents.

Razorpay's mobile engineering team documented their journey building a new payments app from scratch during remote work. They made deliberate choices about tech stack (React Native, TypeScript, GraphQL), tooling, and team practices before writing a single feature. The result: 35K installs and 17K monthly active users within 3 months, launched on schedule.

Key Takeaways

Critical Insight

By investing in infrastructure, automation, and team practices upfront, Razorpay's mobile team shipped on time, avoided burnout, and scaled to 35K installs in 3 months while working remotely.

The article details their mini-hackathon crisis days before launch when graph interactions weren't meeting design standards, and the surprising decision they made about vernacular support without product asking for it.

About This Article

Problem

Razorpay's mobile team struggled with graph interactions that didn't work the way designers wanted. The issue kept coming up for months and blocked progress before launch, even after several attempts to fix it.

Solution

Four engineers from the team paired up for a mini hackathon. They tested every possible fix systematically until they got the exact behavior the designers needed.

Impact

The team fixed the interaction issue just days before code freeze. Both engineers and designers were happy with how it turned out in the final product.