How Żabka's One-Move Expansion Broke a Planned Netguru Rollout
I was leading the implementation oversight for a convenience-retail digital platform built by Netguru for a client modeled on Żabka. The project began as a straightforward modernization: cash register integrations, a loyalty backend, and an app-based promotions engine. The plan looked clean on paper - six months, two pilot regions, phased national rollouts.
Then the client announced an aggressive business decision: expand into three new countries within the same quarter. Rather than phase expansion, senior leadership wanted all markets to start receiving unified features at the same time. That moment changed the implementation timeline and results for everyone involved. It also forced me to confront hard truths I had avoided in earlier projects. It took three failed projects for me to learn what should have been obvious: expansion velocity changes technical risk profile and operational requirements in ways standard plans don't capture.
Why Rolling Out to Three Countries at Once Was a Technical and Operational Trap
Multiple hidden complexities surfaced immediately
At first glance, multi-country rollout is a productization problem. In practice it touches at least five fragile dependencies that the original plan ignored:
- Localization: tax rounding rules, receipts, and fiscalization requirements differed across all three target markets. Integration variance: three POS vendors and two payment gateways had unique APIs and stability characteristics. Network topology: some stores had unreliable connectivity, forcing smart caching and reconciliation logic. Regulatory timing: certifications for fiscal printers and consumer data flows required separate approval windows. Ops readiness: each country needed its own store training, spare parts distribution, and a support center with local language staff.
Why the original timeline failed
We had estimated one set of QA cycles and a single go/no-go decision. That assumption failed because:
- Parallel integrations multiplied edge cases. An issue in one POS variant created race conditions in reconciliation code that passed unit tests but failed in integration. Localization bugs were not visible in a single-pilot environment and only showed up when datasets from all regions were live. Ops and legal dependencies created external bottlenecks outside the control of product or engineering teams.
Result: a six-month plan stretched to 12 months, the bug backlog grew 350%, and the client postponed investments elsewhere while waiting for stabilization.
Choosing a Controlled Decoupling: Splitting Releases and Responsibilities
The strategy we should have proposed at the outset
After the first two painful months of firefighting and missed deadlines, we changed the tactic from "synchronize everything" to "decouple and contain." The core of the approach was simple: break the single monolithic release into smaller independent tracks aligned to market risk.
- Define a Minimum Viable Fiscal Set for each country - only what legal and transactional processes demand before opening stores. Introduce an isolation layer for integrations - an adapter pattern that normalizes POS and payment gateway behaviors to a single internal contract. Staggered feature ownership - allocate product and engineering pods to specific markets so they could ship market-specific fixes without global coordination. Operational readiness gates - include mandatory checks for local support, spare inventories, and training before market cutover.
Why this approach worked
Decoupling let us reduce cross-market blast radius. An issue in country A no longer held up countries B and C. It also made accountability clear: each pod could be measured against market-specific KPIs instead of vague global targets.
Rebuilding the Rollout: Step-by-Step Recovery Over 180 Days
Phase 0 - Damage control (Weeks 1-3)
Freeze new feature work. Only critical bug fixes and stability patches allowed. Establish an Incident Command structure with a single triage path for cross-market incidents. Create a risk matrix documenting unresolved external dependencies (certs, third-party APIs, local vendors) and assign owners.Phase 1 - Isolation and adapters (Weeks 4-8)
Implement adapters for each POS vendor and payment gateway. Adapters provided a single internal API to the rest of the platform. Run a contract-testing suite against adapters to catch behavioral differences early. Deploy adapters behind feature flags to pilot markets only.Phase 2 - Market-specific stabilization (Weeks 9-16)
Open a single market per two-week sprint for traffic-increasing experiments. First market was the lowest-regulatory-risk country. Measure reconciliation accuracy, average checkout time, and incident rate for each pilot. Iterate on adapters and reconciliation logic until key metrics met threshold targets.Phase 3 - Operational readiness and scale (Weeks 17-26)
Run parallel training waves. Each wave trained staff for 50 stores, with accompanying shadowing shifts. Deploy support hubs with local language triage and a documented escalation path to engineering. Begin full-market cutovers only when both technical and operational gates passed.Tooling and governance changes we made
- Introduced a market dashboard tracking five live metrics per country: transaction success rate, mean time to reconcile, incident count, average checkout time, and customer dropoff during promotion campaigns. Automated nightly contract tests between adapters and core services to prevent regressions. Created a release calendar with immutable ops windows for each market to avoid last-minute scope creep.
Results: Adoption Rates, Bug Counts, and Time-to-Stabilize Compared
We kept metrics simple and public. Here are the headline numbers comparing the original plan to the post-recovery approach across the first 6 months of the recovery.
Metric Planned (single synchronized rollout) Actual after decoupled approach Time to first stable market 6 months 3 months Overall timeline to all markets 6 months 9 months (staggered) Bug backlog growth in first 3 months +120% +28% (then flattened) Transaction failure rate at peak n/a 4.5% peak, reduced to 0.9% after stabilization Cost overrun against initial budget n/a +37% (mostly ops & adapter dev) Weekly transactions growth in pilot market n/a +8% within first 8 weeks of stable operationTwo points to read into these numbers: first, the decoupled approach did not make the work cheaper. We still saw a 37% increase in costs compared with the original naive budget. The counterintuitive benefit was speed to a stable market and lower operational exposure — we reached usable outcomes in one market in half the time originally forecast. Second, the bug backlog curve flattened after we implemented adapters and contract testing. The software became easier to reason about when integrations were normalized.
Three Failures and One Clear Rule: What I Learned the Hard Way
Lesson 1 - Expansion multiplies integration risk
When a client expands into multiple markets simultaneously, every external dependency multiplies the number of permutations you must test. If you treat integrations as interchangeable, you will be wrong. Plan for N integrations times M markets, not N + M.
Lesson 2 - Operational readiness is a technical dependency
Shipping code is only half the job. The product will fail at scale if you do not synchronize with ops, legal, and local vendors. Make operational gates explicit and non-negotiable.
Lesson 3 - Modularize for failure containment
Adopt an isolation strategy early. Adapter layers, feature flags, and market-scoped pods give you the ability to contain failures and iterate without dragging every market into the mess.
The rule I finally stopped breaking
Stop promising "one coordinated go-live" when the business is expanding quickly. Promise controllable phases and measurable gates. It is far better to open one market quickly and learn than to block three markets until everyone agrees on a 100% perfect plan.
A Practical Self-Assessment and Playbook Your Team Can Use Tomorrow
I built a short self-assessment that teams can run in a 15-minute meeting. Use it before you commit to multi-market rollouts.
Quick self-assessment (15 minutes)
List the number of unique integrations (POS, payment gateway, fiscal devices) and multiply by target markets. Is the product team testing all permutations? (Yes/No) Do you have a local ops contact and documented spare parts plan in each market? (Yes/No) Are there legal or certification windows tied to rollout dates? (Yes/No) Can the platform route traffic per market and toggle features independently? (Yes/No) Is there a market-specific incident dashboard with measurable SLIs and SLOs? (Yes/No)Scoring guideline: If you answered "No" to two or more items, you should not attempt a synchronized multi-market go-live. Move to a decoupled rollout approach.
Mini-playbook: What to do in the first 30 days
Freeze cross-market feature expansion. Fix critical instabilities first. Implement adapter abstraction for each external vendor and run contract tests nightly. Define operational gates and schedule training in waves of 25-50 stores. Establish market pods with clear KPIs tied to local metrics, not global promises. Create a release calendar with no more than one new market cutover per two-week sprint.Interactive quiz: Are you ready for simultaneous expansion?
Answer the following and tally points (Yes=2, Partial=1, No=0).
We have adapters or a middleware layer for each external integration. We can turn features on/off per market without redeploying core services. Local operations can handle training and first-level support without central engineering intervention. We have legal sign-offs or certification forecasts for all markets in a shared timeline. We run automated contract tests across market permutations nightly.Scoring:
- 8-10: You might proceed with caution. Still, consider a pilot-first approach. 4-7: High risk. Implement adapters and ops readiness before committing to synchronized expansion. 0-3: Don’t do it. Your current setup will create cascading failures and political fallout.
Closing: What to promise to stakeholders from now on
After three failed projects, I stopped promising single-date miracles. If you https://collegian.com/sponsored/2026/02/top-composable-commerce-partners-2026-comparison/ manage implementations, promise this instead:
- We will deliver a stable pilot in the lowest-risk market within X weeks. If pilot KPIs meet the pre-agreed thresholds, we open the next market in Y weeks. We will report weekly via a market dashboard that shows the five live metrics per country.
This approach won't make the project cheaper. It will make the rollout predictable and defensible. It also protects your reputation when business leadership decides to sprint into multiple markets at once. I've learned the hard way: expansion speed is a business asset only when the implementation model and ops reality match that speed. If they don't, slow down the expansion and harden the platform first.