Talk: Replatforming Online Search for a Major High Street Retailer
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Speaker:
Stephen Tjasink
Talk description
Title:
Replatforming Online Search for a Major High Street Retailer
Short synopsis:
This is the story of an agile product team that moved a major high street retailer from a proprietary search solution to cloud-based microservices backed by Elasticsearch. With minimal disruption to customers and sales, they improved availability and latency, and hit the deadline of being live for Black Friday 2019. This was a big shift in ways of working, moving to You Build It, You Run It with multiple deployments per day, rather than the traditional support model with weekly deployments.
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Long synopsis (optional):
Searching and browsing for products are the most important customer journeys for an online retailer. If a customer can’t find a product they want to buy, then you can’t sell it to them. How do you replatform this capability at a major high street retailer, with minimal disruption to customer experience and commercial performance while improving availability, latency, and lowering costs? This is the story of a team that moved from a proprietary, on-premise search solution to a cloud-based microservices solution backed by Elasticsearch, used by the website and mobile apps. This required a considerable shift in ways of working, with the delivery model moving to You Build It, You Run It with multiple deployments per day, rather than the traditional support model with weekly deployments. Being the first team in the organisation to deliver in this way presented a number of challenges. Having been given permission to do so, we were determined to demonstrate through delivery and success what could be achieved by transforming ways of working and to act as an exemplar for other areas of the business. This talk documents the team’s 18 month journey. Initially, a small discovery team worked on MVP scope, solution architecture, and the size and shape of the team. Choices were specifically made to allow functionality to be deployed early and often. We then built up our functionality until we reached feature parity with the legacy solution, and beyond into brand new features. We released our MVP to a small percentage of customers, and increased the percentage as more features were added. The release to 100% of customers occurred six weeks before Black Friday, followed by Christmas and January sales. The new search capability served Black Friday traffic with 100% uptime and no degradation in response times. The team was a cross-functional team, including consultants working alongside permanent staff in development, testing, operational, and leadership roles. As the team grew, we focused on upskilling more junior members of the team as well as feature delivery. Adopting You Build It, You Run It from the start meant operability and resilience were built in by design. Types of testing were chosen to fulfil different roles in testing individual microservices and the interactions between them. Key learnings for attendees: - Product ownership choices that allow teams to deliver early and often - Transformation and stakeholder management based on iterations and learning - Architecture and technology choices that help the team to focus on useful deliverables and minimise dependencies - Architecture and technology choices that support scaling and resilience easily - Testing choices that work well in a microservices environment - Building for operability from the start of the project - Ways of working that encourage team ownership and improve productivity This talk is presented by the technical lead and delivery lead of the team who are a consultant and a permanent member of staff respectively. Note: The synopsis is currently anonymised so as not to mention the organisation or specific suppliers. We are working on permission to publish specifics so that these details can be added to the presentation.
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