Road to change
As an e-commerce team for Dr.Max group we’ve gone a long way in past couple years. Unlike traditional HQs our role is to mainly look for synergies between countries. As IT is obviously one of the best fields to do so that’s where our biggest focus is.
The idea to go with one common solution came at the time when our Czech ecom team‘s legacy platform was reaching its EOL. So we started a move and during 2019 prepared a basis of ecosystem currently deployed in 4 countries with 5th soon to be launched.
Online pharmacy is not a simple business even more so complicated by the fact that each country has slightly different legal framework which we need to comply with — two examples to give you an idea:
- in Poland all marketing for pharmacies is prohibited including the online one
- in Romania when ordering an OTC drug online you need to fill in a form with some personal details and confirm you’ve read it’s package insert
As in any company with as big online presence as ours there’re always many parallel projects and initiatives and as we’re trying to minimize the risk of some initiatives overlapping or doing same work twice we’ve had the setup that at the time worked for us but we also know isn’t the best fit for us anymore.
Project based teams
Our teams revolve around two things:
- One-off projects with limited scope
- Continuous work on countries
With that in mind for each of these setup we had several teams. The team would always consist of Product owner, Scrum master, Developers and a QA engineer.
In parallel we have pool of business analysts ingesting business requests and preparing a user stories for the teams. This helps us with two things — maintain quality in our user stories, ensure all initiatives are aligned throughout our markets.
Where this solution struggles
On paper this setup seems to work, reality as we all know in the end tends to differ — our main struggles revolve around
- Unclear technical ownership of respective parts of the application and its codebase
- Way too complicated process to ensure quality of solution delivered
- Legacy infrastructure and lack of propper CD
- Split of product ownership and its direction between POs and countries
- Human element — i.e. if there’s a loophole it will always be used :)
These struggles nevertheless are nothing that cannot be improved. Rather though than trying to reinvent the wheel we’re looking into proven approaches and ways to implement our setup into our organization.
What approaches are we considering? Stay tuned for another article coming soon.
