Sharethrough

Teams are product-aligned with frequent cross-team collaboration involving both engineering and product. Within the team, there is a close collaboration between our UX designer, product manager, engineering manager and the engineers. Development on stories and chores occurs both in a solo and a pairing capacity. We take a Kanban approach to managing the development flow, with daily standups and twice-monthly retrospectives attended by engineers, product, and design. Ad hoc sessions are used to discuss upcoming chunks of feature work or experimentation (scoping, level of effort). While life invariably requires the occasional working from home, we highly value in person collaboration.

There is a strong emphasis on ownership of process, solutions, planning, and communication. Context is freely shared with an emphasis on transparency and empathy. Twice annual product-specific off-sites, include engineering, product, sales, design, executive and account management, and oftentimes clients themselves, in order to deepen industry knowledge and product strategy. Yearly company-wide off-sites encourage cross-team connections and learnings.

Projects are hosted on Github with pull requests handled via Travis CI. We continuously deploy the application, at each commit to master, often several times in a day. Development occurs on branches of the project, with pull requests created on Github, which supports peer review of code. Code reliability is important and maintained via an expansive test suite of unit, feature, and javascript tests run both at the pull request level (via Travis CI) and via the private Jenkins instances that run the capistrano scripts to deploy to AWS.

Communication occurs via Slack, Google hangout (when there are remote participants) and face-to-face. Above all, we apply a retrospective and iterative approach to our processes themselves. We experiment with our processes to better tune them, realizing that solutions are not everlasting and often necessarily change alongside the team, product, and mission. Engineers are given the freedom to use the development tools that make sense for them with popular choices including vim, RubyMine, and Sublime. To facilitate onboarding, our onboarding includes both a company-level multiday university and a product/engineering-targeted onboarding curriculum.

Various technical challenges have our interest. Updating and streamlining our deployment process is currently underway. Our current one-size-fits-all-teams way we setup our environments will give way this year to explorations in moving to a more flexible container-based one, which is providing a wealth of explorations, learnings, and backend re-architecting.

The challenge of balancing what’s already working with ensuring application performance and ease of development will drive us to continue looking into updating to the latest version of existing frameworks or migrating to new ones, such as an imminent re-exploration of frontend frameworks (and choosing a successor to the stable, yet aging AngularJS 1.x used for our publisher platform application).

Our needs diversify as the advertising market continuously evolves, and currently work is underway to take ownership of publisher-oriented direct ad serving which brings with it the challenges of high reliability, scalability, and speed. In fact, the overall need for scalability is currently driving experiments and architectural explorations.

For our publishers, we’re challenging ourselves to more fully provide them with the data that they need, where profiles (technical, focus, size) varies greatly from client to client. Balancing the growth of our client base while maintaining and improving the performance of the ads on their pages is key. Motivating and empowering our users with actionable insights is only part of the equation. Automating time-intensive manual user tasks to improve productivity and satisfaction is also another focus area for us. One such area of automation is the dynamic adjustment of ad presentation to differentiate our platform’s value to a publisher over other delivery channels.