Welcome to the MásMóvil engineering channel!
Hi! Thanks for stopping by! I would like to tell you a little about ourselves and some of the great things that our team is doing in our offices here in Madrid.
As I suspect you know already, Grupo MásMóvil is one of the fastest growing companies in Spain and the fastest growing telecom company in Europe. Last year, our sales and financial performance were excellent, and we would like to think that our team had something to do with that. Grupo MásMóvil is comprised of four brands: Yoigo, MásMóvil, Pepephone, and LlamaYA. Each brand has different target markets, goals, and growth curves, but our engineering teams share the same culture. In this channel, we will discuss our digital culture, some of the great tools we are using and how we are harnessing them, technical challenges that we encounter and overcome, and how we are creating innovative software that is focused entirely on a great user experience. Customer-Centric is the mantra you will hear over and over in our offices, and we mean it when we say it.
Who we were
Less than a year ago, our engineering team was a completely different animal. We were a fairly typical IT organisation, still very much operating in waterfall mode, relying almost exclusively on external development teams to run our public websites, security operations, CRM, and internal applications.
We developed software that more or less met our needs, but we weren't necessarily driving the company's digital culture forward. There was nothing to frown about, per se, but something was missing; we wanted our engineering team to be a change agent for our company, and not just a cost that ended up as a line item on a spreadsheet. We also wanted to attract top technical talent throughout Spain and Europe. We wanted to become a high performing, agile engineering team providing real value to our business, a team dedicated to driving cultural and technological change throughout the organisation. An asset, if you will. What changed? Well, quite a bit, actually. It all started with the creation of what we call the Digital Hub.
Who we are
The MásMóvil leadership team created the Digital Hub to provide our nascent engineering team room to grow and operate in an autonomous environment unconstrained by traditional IT operations and governance. We designed our own physical space where we could operate in an open environment sans boundaries, a place where collaboration and communication were encouraged and demanded. In this space, our engineering team has flourished. On any given day in the hub, you will witness a beehive of activity as our UX experts, SEO and Social Media whiz-kids, and crack Analytics team work side by side with our product owners, scrum masters, digital analysts, and developers from multiple teams to overcome challenging technical and design issues in order to deliver best-in-class products for our users.
We also work really hard to create a culture of learning and continuous improvement in the Digital Hub. Every week, we have technical workshops on everything from GraphQL, BigQuery, to using Helm to manage our deployments of Kubernetes resources. We have technical talks focusing on subjects like SEO best practises, server-side Rendering in Angular, and blockchain technologies. We also invite outside experts to discuss not only technical issues, but also to tell stories about their company's own digital transformations.
In the Digital Hub, we don't work on projects for six months or more before delivering value to our customers and business; instead, we use Agile Methodologies to get products on the market as soon as possible so that we solicit feedback from our user communities, run A/B tests, and measure our performance to help inform our designs and feature prioritisation.
In this introductory post, I don't want to dive too deeply into the technical side of things — we will dedicate plenty of time to technical deep-dives in subsequent posts. Instead, I want to touch upon some of the things we are doing right.
We understood that we no longer want to work with monolithic architectures. Instead, we focus on building a suite of highly performant, scalable, and singularly focused micro-services running in the cloud and orchestrated by Kubernetes. Currently, we develop our micro-services in Java and Node, and we continue to explore additional options like Go and the polyglot framework Vert.x. We use GitHub to manage our codebase, and CircleCI for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployments. We monitor our services with tools like Pingdom and Prometheus. On the front-end, we use both Angular 5 and React. At some point in the near future we will consolidate our efforts in one or the other; in the meantime, our developers push the boundaries of both, allowing us to make informed decisions about how we move forward in the future.
Where we are going
We have made a lot of progress, but there is a lot of work to do. We have real technical problems that need solving, and although we have effected cultural change in the organisation, it isn't enough. We began our company's digital transformation in the Digital Hub, and now we are extending it throughout the company, from our IT department to Human Resources.
Our goals are immodest in nature. In addition to transforming our internal culture, we also want to drive technological and cultural innovation in Spain and the rest of Europe, by sharing our ideas, pain points, and solutions; contributing to open-source projects; participating in conferences and technological roundtables; and hosting Meetups and workshops in Madrid.
We also want to use this site as a tool for attracting the best talent in the region. We hope to see you back here so that we can continue our conversation. Interested in joining us? (We are hiring!)
