FeatureOps: A cultural and technical lever for fearless delivery across Spain’s largest retailer

Customer Snapshot

• Industry: Retail / Grocery
• Company size: ~100,000 employees
• Location: Valencia, Spain (1,600+ stores across Spain & Portugal)
• Website: mercadona.com
• Product Used: Unleash Enterprise

At a Glance

• Mercadona Tech is the software backbone of Spain’s largest retailer, powering logistics, e-commerce, and fulfillment across 1,600+ stores and dedicated “hives.”
  
• The cost of failure is enormous, with hundreds of warehouse workers depending on stable systems — but the cost of moving slowly is just as high in a fast-moving retail environment.
  
• An in-house feature flag platform couldn’t keep up, requiring heavy maintenance, limited segmentation, and tribal knowledge to operate.
  
• Mercadona standardized on FeatureOps to balance safety and speed — enabling continuous delivery, progressive rollouts, and real-time feedback without sacrificing reliability.
  
• Unleash provides the foundation, delivering enterprise-grade governance, rollout control, and visibility across every product team and technology stack.

Top Challenges

Mercadona is Spain’s largest supermarket chain, serving millions of customers each week through a complex mix of in-store operations and online fulfillment. Behind the scenes, Mercadona Tech runs the e-commerce and logistics systems that keep everything running on time.

When an issue arises in production, the impact can ripple through hundreds of workers in a single hive. If a picking system goes down, entire shifts can stall. For a company of this scale, reliability and speed must coexist — and the traditional release model wasn’t delivering either.

Before adopting FeatureOps, Mercadona’s delivery process was defined by:

• Big-bang releases that created high stress and high risk 
• Slow feedback loops that delayed validation of new ideas 
• Manual, fragmented rollouts that limited visibility and wasted time 
• Fear of change that slowed experimentation 
• A homegrown feature flag system that was costly and difficult to maintain 

“If you do a big-bang rewrite or delivery,” said Sergio Revilla Velasco, Head of Engineering Operations at Mercadona Tech, “the only thing you are certain of is a big bang. We want to be lean. We want to deliver fast. We want to have the capability to put code into production continuously — and the big-bang model was in direct conflict with those values. Feature flags became the perfect enabler, because they let us deploy small, incomplete pieces safely, get real feedback sooner, and live without fear.”

Why Unleash

Mercadona Tech initially tried to build its own FeatureOps system, aiming to handle segmentation, rollout strategies, and governance across multiple stacks and environments. But the platform quickly became a burden. It demanded constant maintenance, struggled with limited capabilities, and depended heavily on the institutional knowledge of a few engineers.

“We tried to build it ourselves,” said Emilio Carrión, Staff Engineer for Logistics, “but it didn’t make sense to keep reinventing and maintaining a platform that Unleash already provides out of the box.”

Unleash gave Mercadona Tech everything it needed to scale FeatureOps safely and consistently:

• Advanced rollout strategies across hives, stores, and regions
  
• Real-time governance and auditability for compliance and leadership visibility
  
• SDKs for every stack — Django, FastAPI, Android, iOS, React
  
• Simple APIs and UI that make feature management accessible to engineers and product teams alike
  
• Automated flag lifecycle management that prevents technical debt and keeps the system clean 

Product managers can now see which features are active in which stores, how many users are exposed, and when a flag can be safely removed — turning governance from a bottleneck into a shared, real-time control layer.

The Benefits of Unleash

With Unleash, Mercadona Tech turned software delivery into a repeatable, low-risk process that mirrors the company’s own operational model: start small, validate early, scale with confidence.

Each new feature is rolled out in phases — first in a single hive, then to a set of stores, then to an entire region. If issues appear, engineers can roll back instantly without redeploying code.

“In a logistics environment like ours, you can’t afford downtime,” said Carrión. “If something goes wrong, I only have to switch off a feature toggle — it’s that simple.”

Key outcomes include:

• Thousands of deployments each month are converted into features that customers actually use
  
• 13-hour average deployment cycle time across 12 product teams
  
• Reduced mean time to restore (MTTR) through instant kill switches 

Fearless experimentation with safe validation in hives or pilot stores

The Business Outcomes

By adopting Unleash, Mercadona replaced high-risk, big-bang releases with a safe, iterative delivery model that mirrors how the company itself operates: test in a hive, validate in stores, expand by region, and only then go nationwide.

For Spain’s largest grocer, that shift transformed software from a source of operational risk into a driver of business value — bringing the same precision and confidence to digital delivery that defines every Mercadona shopping experience.