Architecture and Technology Meetings at Getir Market Tribe

Here at Getir Market Tribe, we’ve 3 different technology funnels ( Discovery, Incentives, Checkout ) and lots of cross-functional engineering squads. We are designing complex systems, updating our architectures, and dealing with technical problems. Our tech stack is extending day by day, squads are interested in new technologies and implementing some of them.

We were looking to find a proper way to share our tech agenda with the entire engineering organization and this is how we started to design a meeting series which we called as “Technology & Architecture Review”. In this article, we’ll share the story of the Technology & Architecture Review meeting.

Market Tribe is a technology organization responsible for Getir’s “groceries in minutes” business.

Definition of Goals

First of all, we’ve defined some goals for the meeting. Our main motivation was keeping up to date with each tribe funnel & squad and being sure that we’re tracking our technology journey together as a healthy organization.

In our daily software engineering journey we’re dealing with lots of technology problems including microservices, infrastructure, cloud-native problems, and many different databases on our platform.

Let’s take a look at our initial goals :

• Sharing architectural updates and system designs with the latest technical diagrams.
• Sharing the technologies which we are using and discussing the new technologies which we are interested in.
• Sharing the bounded contexts of our domain, defining and being up to date about our domain boundaries.
• Tracking our technical debts, improvement points, and following outcomes together.

After the definition of goals we’ve started to design our meeting format and agenda for the “Technology & Architecture Review”.

Tech & Architecture Review meeting agenda

As we mentioned at the beginning of this story we’ve different technology funnels in Market tribe which we called Discovery, Incentives and Checkout. As a first step, we’ve separated our meeting by our technology funnels and each funnel has its own section during the meeting and the presentation.

For the meeting agenda, we’ve selected some critical topics to share with the organization that we care about.

CTO Office, Keynote
It is the opening talk for the meeting by the CTO Office. We’re focusing on some topics like the latest important updates, and key points about our tech vision. CTO office talk is usually represented by the Engineering Leader of the tribe.

Bounded Contexts
General overview of the Bounded Contexts of our domain. Defining and being up to date about our domain boundaries is one of the important parts of domain-driven design approach.

Architecture & Updates
The technical architecture of our platform is like a living organism. We’re making some updates or adding new components from time to time. In this part of our meeting, we’re aiming to share a general overview of planned or past architectural updates, like the latest database diagrams, and infrastructure changes.

System Designs
In our technology funnels, every squad is dealing with designing complex systems. With this section, we are focusing to sharing a general overview of System Designs prepared by our engineering squads.

Technical Debts
Technical debts are part of engineering. In this section, we’re trying to define and share our technical debts, explaining the solutions, and planning a common roadmap.

Tech Radar
We’re extending our tech stack day by day, interested in new technologies and implementing some of them. This section is for sharing a general overview of technologies that we’re using and discussing trending technologies that we are interested in.

Q&A
As an addition to the agenda topics, asking questions and answering them is one of the fundamental reasons for having Architecture and Technology Meetings. All questions are welcome in every section.

CTO Office : It’s a term which defines a small team including mostly Staff Engineers and reports directly to the CTO.

Architecture and Technology Meetings is ready, it is time to go! — Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

Making First Sessions & Feedback

First Sessions
After defining meeting goals and topics, we’ve decided to plan our first meeting and scheduled Architecture and Technology Meetings monthly as a beginning. We’ve invited all the technology funnels and engineering squads in the Market Tribe.

In the first sessions, all technology funnels shared their latest statuses by our agenda, and it was amazingly collaborative. Many members of the engineering organization have been asked challenging questions about system designs, bounded contexts, infrastructure, and databases, and all questions were answered by the related engineering squad.

Time to feedbacks
After the first sessions, we started to receive feedbacks from our engineering organization. Most of them were very positive and related to the positive outcomes of the meeting. And there was some other helpful feedbacks like defining a time box for every squad.

A slide from Architecture and Technology Meetings.

Summary

Having a proper way to share technology agenda, talking with the latest updates (system/architecture/technical debts/tech radar), asking questions, creating a collaborative environment, challenging technical ideas together and tracking outcomes together are fundamentally critical in every healthy software engineering organization.

Architecture and Technology Meetings are helping us for the aligning as the Getir Market engineering organization.

Bonus:
If you want to be a part of our Getir’s Engineering journey please apply to our open positions 🚀