Meet the Supermetrics Product Development Team

Siiri Hakulinen — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 12:17:39 +0000

The Supermetrics products allow businesses to integrate their marketing data from siloed sales and marketing platforms and manage, transform, and analyze that data to inform decision making, optimize marketing efforts, and improve business results.

It sounds simple, but when you factor in the scale we operate on, how many petabytes of data we process, and the fact that we do this live, it isn't simple. Around fifteen percent of global advertising is reported through our products.

It's a team effort to make all that happen. In this blog post, we'll introduce you to our Product Development organization, how it works, and which product areas each team owns.

100+ engineers, three product groups

Currently, our teams are divided into three product groups, with 4–6 development teams in each group:
The Data Integrations Group owns the data sources — they build and maintain the API integrations between our product and the marketing and sales platforms where we pull the customers’ data.
The Platform and Apps Group owns where the data goes and what is done with it — they build the Supermetrics Marketing Intelligence Cloud, and develop a host of value-adding functionality for, combining, analyzing, and managing data.
The Infrastructure Group encompasses DevOps, performance engineering, security, and developer experience.

Each development team consists of people with various roles working together. Software Engineers, Lead Software Engineers, and Engineering Managers are paired with a dedicated Product Manager and Designer, and experts from fields like performance engineering and DevOps are on hand when needed.

How we work together

Each team has the autonomy to choose its ways of working. We share some working patterns to make internal communication and alignment easier and avoid siloing.

Most (if not all) teams have chosen to use Kanban, which we’ve modified a bit to suit our needs.
We're agile and combine useful features from Scrum and Kanban to manage stories.
Jira is our tool of choice for keeping tabs on tasks, epics, and the like. We plan each epic and discuss these plans across the organization to keep everyone on the same page.
We prefer more communication over less. As the engineering organization grows and our products become more complex, teams must communicate with each other to avoid silos. On top of team dailies and project-level communications, the Product Development team has a monthly all-hands meeting for topical updates, highlights from the product groups’ work, and team updates. There’s also a Super Product Session every month, where the Product Development team shares news on the product strategy, roadmap, and release calendar and demoes new features to the rest of the company.
While different teams are for different things, all engineers at Supermetrics can contribute anywhere in the codebase. If you see a bug on another team's domain, you're welcome to submit a pull request and get the appropriate team member to review it.

Our tech stack

Most of our backend code uses PHP, MySQL, and Redis. You might see some Go, Node.js, or Python, too. We use these technologies locally in Docker containers. Our staging and production rely fully on cloud services provided by Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare.

Our frontend is based mostly on React, TypeScript, and Google App Script. Some projects still use Vue.js. We use REST APIs for communication.

Without going too deep into the weeds, here's a short list of other tools and technologies we use in our daily work: Jira, GitHub, PHPStan, Psalm, Jest, PubSub, PHPUnit, and Kubernetes.

Introducing our engineering groups and teams

Data Integrations

A data integration is an API integration that fetches data and processes it to match the user's request before sending it to a destination. The Data Integrations Group is responsible for these third-party API integrations and fetching data from various marketing and sales platforms.

The Connectors Engineering team maintains and migrates APIs within existing coded connectors. We currently have over 150 connectors, half of which are coded. It means they're written using actual code and need to be maintained and adjusted as the user base grows.
The Connector Platform team owns the technology that allows us to build data integrations, including codeless connectors. You can read more about them in this tech blog post. Essentially, the Connector Platform team empowers us to build and maintain data integrations faster and better than before.
The Connectors Apps team builds end-to-end products with user-facing interfaces, such as File Import and the Connector Builder.
The New Connectors team uses our own technology to configure new data integrations. The Connector Specialists don't have to have coding skills. They only need to understand the API documentation and our configuration schema.

Platform and Apps

The Platform and Apps Group leads the charge on our new product strategy, where we expand beyond the data pipelining solution that has made Supermetrics successful in the past ten years. They’re building a product roadmap that will cover all the stages of the marketing data lifecycle, including exciting new fields like data storage, governance, and data transformations.

The Destinations team focuses on building and maintaining the external data destinations to which Supermetrics pipelines data. We partner with and build functionality on top of widely used data analysis and visualization applications, like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Looker Studio, PowerBI.
The Customer Growth team is responsible for maintaining, improving, and measuring the new customer journey, including registration for a new account, starting a trial, and providing purchasing services within the Supermetrics user interface. The team provides contextual nudges for customers to try out new products and offers embedded upgrade mechanics for subscriptions.
The Data Management team builds value-added features related to data management, like Custom Fields and Data Blending that allow customers to normalize and merge their marketing data from a multitude of marketing and sales platforms into meaningful formats for reporting and analytics.
The Data Storage team builds and maintains value-added features related to data storage, including external data warehouses like BigQuery and Snowflake, as well as the Supermetrics Storage offering.
The Customer Platform team is responsible for the overall function, look, and feel of the Supermetrics user interface. They improve and maintain the design system, advocating for component usage across the group, and developing value-added features related to the user interface.

Infrastructure Group

The Infrastructure Group operates cross-functionally and supports the work of other product groups and teams. Infrastructure teams are:

DevOps
Performance Engineering
Security
Developer Experience

Our Product Development organization have expanded over time

Each group and team offers a unique perspective and distinct technical challenges. What they have in common is that engineers can truly influence not just their own work but the evolution of the Supermetrics products and their technical implementation. All our teams are also made up of wildly talented and helpful colleagues.

We continue to grow and are looking for talented people to join our Product Development team. Explore career opportunities at supermetrics.com/careers/engineering.

Forem: Siiri Hakulinen