The Supermetrics Product Development team has almost quadrupled in the past two years, and we're now just over 100 people strong.
This year, we've started to structure ourselves into Engineering Groups. We expect to improve coherence, communication, and clarity if teams working on related product areas collaborate more closely. Each Group has a dedicated Engineering Director and Product Manager who deeply understand and fully focus on the Group's scope and roadmap.
This blog post introduces the Core Group, which Engineering Director Margarita Veshtort leads. Margarita is a Senior PHP Developer by background. Her two-year journey at Supermetrics led her to become first an Engineering Manager and now an Engineering Director.
Core Group handles billions of queries every month
Supermetrics builds data integration and pipelining technology that helps marketers and analysts combine scattered data and automate reporting. Every month, we transfer around 2.5 petabytes of marketing data from over a hundred sources through billions of queries into various analysis, visualization, and warehousing tools.
The Core Group owns the backend platform that handles queries for all Supermetrics products. "We own the Supermetrics custom framework and are responsible for how it aggregates and caches data", Margarita explains. "Everything we do is highly interconnected and affects all customers, which makes our work technically challenging and very interesting."
Performance is a huge priority for the Core Group's development teams. "Our platform can't become a bottleneck to the data flow because it would immediately affect all our products and the 750,000+ end users", Margarita says.
Two backend teams and one focused on frontend
Currently, the Core Group consists of two engineering teams that are both backend-focused. Early next year, Core Group gets a third team that focuses on frontend development.
- The Core Platform team owns the backend platform and provides services like data aggregation to all the other Engineering teams within Supermetrics.
- The Core Projects team focuses on developing and maintaining core features like data transformation and data source connections, which are available for all Supermetrics products.
Both Core Group teams work a lot on PHP because that's what our custom framework is built with. "Our Group's engineers also need to be well-versed in caching and message brokers, as well as databases", Margarita says.
The teams were split last summer, and the Core Group now determines each team's scope more specifically. But that doesn't mean the teams will work in silos. While each team has its own roadmap and dailies, they routinely collaborate on the Group level.
Code reviews, for example, can be done in collaboration between the two teams. "Both teams also work with the same Product Manager, who deeply understands the whole Group's scope and shared roadmap," Margarita says. "Any decisions that would influence both teams' work we discuss together."
"The teams can also flexibly share or swap tasks when it's efficient", Margarita continues. "We don't want to be ruled by our processes — if it makes more sense for one of the teams to take ownership of a task that was originally in the other team's scope, we want to allow that."
Flexibility is evident in the Group's teams in other ways, too. "We like to experiment, and we're open to adopting new practices. Things aren't set in stone," Margarita says. “There are a lot of opportunities for you to influence, not just your work tasks, but also the processes and how we work as a Group.”
Overall, the culture in the Engineering team at Supermetrics is very growth-minded. “We’re looking for ways to learn and improve, and the team members are happy to help each other out”, Margarita says. “That’s a thing I personally really like about working at Supermetrics. People really do care about each other here. For example, my team lead was interested in how I wanted to grow in my career and supported me in it from the beginning. Now I’m trying my best to do the same for the people I work with.”
2023: new features and some refactoring
So what's coming up next year for the Core Group? "The Core Projects team is currently working on data blending, which will carry on to 2023", Margarita says. "They're also working on data transformation, another new feature, which, like all Core Group's features, will be available for all Supermetrics products."
There's some refactoring work on the radar, too. "As our platform is so interconnected and such a crucial part of Supermetrics, we must approach reworking our codebase with the greatest care", Margarita says. "We refactored our data aggregation service this fall to increase its efficiency, and other performance-boosting restructuring will become topical as our products continue to grow and become more complex."
Next year, the teams would like to start splitting some parts of their platform into microservices. They're now working closely with our Principal Software Architect, planning the best way forward.
"Working with a growing product, we always have more to learn and improve, and the work doesn't get boring", Margarita says. "And it's not just the technical side of things, but also how we work together as a Group and with other Groups."
Communication is a big area of focus for the Core Group next year. "The work we do interlinks with every other Engineering team, which makes clear and timely communication, as well as good documentation, a must for a smooth collaboration with the rest of the Product Development organization," Margarita says.
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The Core Group is hiring: supermetrics.com/careers/engineering
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