Gett.More

A Hackathon in the world of Profitability

Our beloved Gett has gone through a significant transformation during the last 6 months.
Due to the global turbulence the tech industry changes, and the focus of many companies has pivoted towards reaching profitability.

With that in mind, we held our periodic hackathon this week, doing our best to grant a platform for our greatest minds and creative professionals to suggest innovative ideas aimed to improve our business and enhance profitability and monetization.

We strive to bring Hackathon projects to fruition — three of our last Hackathon projects are already raising the quality bar of our product:

• Global Orders Map — Improving Gett’s global branding by visualizing our rides across the globe on a live map.
• Communicative error pages — instead of common, technical 403/500 pages, now Gett presents elegant communication to consumers that encourages patience and additional attempts.
• Ride Exchange Proactive Monitoring — having our service performed by various supply partners across the globe, a brand new microservice is monitoring the communication with each vendor — once issues are diagnosed, the system temporarily disables the malfunctioning functionality.

Continuously improving, we have adjusted the Hackathon structure according to the remarks collected from our teams upon completion of the previous Hackathon 8 months ago — we limited the number of participants per team, shared in advance expected prizes for the winners, set production readiness as one of the main judgment criteria, and, most importantly, — this time, Hackathon included the entire organization, not just R&D! — achieving much better impact and cooperation across the company.

Our Hackathon was spread over two days — June 29/30. The teams were given 24 hours for coding, and 3 hours for demos’ preparations.
This time, the ideas were just awesome!

The spectrum of ideas was incredible, targeting various frontiers of the business — from the main product, through infrastructure to finance and customer care.
Since I cannot describe all the projects here (all of them were just great), I will touch upon and share details on some of the outstanding initiatives.

So first, the winners:

#3 — Saas Lifecycle

The team worked on a project that reduces vendors’ costs by implementing an automated workflow to remove unnecessary licenses for all applications in use in the organization.

The workflow notifies application owners via Slack — those who haven’t utilized their software license; gives them an opportunity to request to keep the license and if not needed automatically disables the license — meaning Gett never pays for licenses it does not need!

The project will allow saving of approximately 5% of annual vendors’ costs p.a.!!

#2 — Gett Carpooling

In order to offer carpooling service for B2B customers, the team developed a solution based on an integration with a third party, to group multiple orders into one order with multiple stop points. The resolution presumes transparency and stability of the customer’s experience, who will still be exposed to his own part of the unified ride.
Along with the creation of new opportunities for our business, the developed solution may allow deprecating an old technology which is used in Gett nowadays.

#1 — Whitelabel Gett

Gett is well known for its B2C and B2B products in Israel and the UK. As a B2B oriented company Gett has created the next generation of corporate ground transportation products, for global travel.
Having a beloved Rider Application, a great Driver Application, a B2B web application and a Customer Care system in our portfolio, it is just natural to group those building blocks into a new product with a new value proposition — Gett Whitelabel.
The team worked on a POC that showed how a system of that kind may work, creating value for a fleet that uses Gett’s technology as a licensed product for its own transportation network management.
Such a product may extend Gett’s value proposition by adding a new brick into the company’s product portfolio. It may create an offering for fleets that are interested in a new and improved technological solution, along with the possible extension of Gett’s B2B Global network and improvement of the level of service provided for our roaming customers thanks to an end-to-end highly integrated system.

In addition to those, there were a few noticeable projects that will create a significant impact from the tech perspective:

Health Check for services before automation run

In order to support a full CI/CD, Gett’s R&D development process relies heavily on automation coverage for our features. For each Pull Request, a suite of end-to-end tests is triggered, to verify that no regression will be resulted by merging the code to production.
Per triggered suit, a development environment is assigned for the tests’ cycle, out of a predefined pool of environments, while the runtime of such a cycle varies between 20 minutes and 1 hour.
Due to the dynamic nature of the development of our infrastructure, some basic services in the environment might sometimes not be available — thus causing failure of the test suite that may be discovered at a later phase of the test cycle. That course of events will result in resource waste — both the development environment that was used for testing and the time of the developer who was waiting for the suite’s run cycle completion.

The team has developed a quick health check process to verify the viability of all required services in an assigned environment, prior to the automation cycle run. If failing, the health check will prevent running the automation on a malfunctional environment and save development time and computing cost!

Speed up Ride Application’s initial screen loading

Nowadays the loading of Gett Rider App’s initial screen lasts a few seconds. That process is even more time consuming when the Rider App is in use within areas where external supply partners are involved.
Such system behavior leads to reduced consumer satisfaction, and potentially even reduces the number of rides performed through our platform.
The team optimized this flow by introducing concurrency to the heavily loaded endpoint on our backend, which is responsible for that initial screen processing, thus speeding it up multiple times, and reducing the time needed for the user to create an order!

So again, the Getters just rocked!
It was a hell of a hackathon, with a bunch of awesome ideas. Some are in production already, generating value for our company!

We had a lot of fun participating in yet another great adventure at Gett.

Keep following our growth and learning in the next Hackathon as well!
Thank you for reading!