Saying No to Jugaad by Hari T N & Subramanian M S

Author:Hari, T N & Subramanian, M S [Hari, T N]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

As Rakshit began working on solutions for these shortcomings, Pramod decided to go on a sabbatical. This occurred within three months of Rakshit joining Bigbasket. This was a big setback. Undeterred, Rakshit continued to work on implementing his recommendations, knowing that the pain felt in the short term would be offset by the significant benefits that Bigbasket would accrue in the long term.

He systematically drove initiatives that addressed all the gaps he had identified in his initial diagnosis:

• Separate teams for specific work areas were created and requests were assigned based on expertise and not availability of bandwidth. At times, this resulted in requests being delayed, waiting for the required expert to get free. But, this approach helped create a culture of prioritisation of requests instead of every request being worked on at the same time.

• Structured processes for code deployment and code freeze deadlines were adhered to, beyond which no change would be incorporated.

• Quality Assurance teams were embedded in the Development teams to establish accountability, ownership and maturity in development processes.

• A dedicated ‘Platforms team’ that would act as a single-point owner for the IT infrastructure was set up to deliver performance at scale.

• Engineering managers were hired to create the right technology capabilities and provide coaching to the developers.

• The architecture was reconfigured to a micro-services model. This helped compartmentalise the code base and isolate the risk of performance issues to the specific micro-service rather than the entire codebase and datastore.

Speed Versus Scalability

The biggest question that any start-up often faces is whether to invest time and effort upfront in designing a system that can scale effortlessly or build a product that would help you launch quickly and then make modifications along the way as the business scales. This is not a trade-off unique to either Bigbasket or start-ups in general. This is equally relevant in urban planning. We have all lived in cities where the here-and-now problem has been addressed but very soon serious problems begin to show up that need an open-heart surgery.

The need for rapid growth results in choices (people, process, architecture) being made based on the velocity needed to support growth while compromising on maintainability and scalability of the technology platforms. This results in the start-up acquiring ‘technical debt’ over a period of time. At some point, the burden of this technology begins to weigh heavily on performance and scalability. Organisations that pause to step back every couple of years to take stock of their technical debt, and work to retire the debt, thrive while those that don’t do so, perish.

In Conclusion

The only constant in the technology industry is change.

—Marc Benioff

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