mPharma Product & Tech: Moving Forward
mPharma just held our third all-company retreat. mPharma team members from offices in 5 countries got together to discuss the future of mPharma and the ways we will continue to make quality medicines affordable and accessible. Hearing all the different ideas from all the different voices of mPharma was truly inspiring. … So inspiring that I felt the need to write a blog post that explains a bit about how mPharma Product & Tech operates and our commitment to share some of our learnings moving forward.
Why We Work
mPharma has a simple mission, to make quality medicines affordable and accessible to all patients, but the path to achieve this is highly complex. Every day we come to work excited to tackle the many human and technological challenges that prevent our mission from being achieved. We not only believe in the impact that we are making, but also in the people that are making that impact a reality. At the end of the day, a line of code is only as good as its human outcome, and we are ensuring that we make a positive difference in the world we live in.
How We Work
In order to understand what we on product and tech are doing to help mPharma achieve its mission, I believe that it’s important to understand our team’s organizational structure and the reasoning behind it.
Previously at mPharma, we had teams grouped around product domains. Given the number of products and services that we are building, this led to unclear responsibilities for the teams and created gaps in what was being worked on. Furthermore, this structure was not aligning well with our business operations or our technical infrastructure.
Thus, we made the decision to structure ourselves in a manner that takes full advantage of our service-oriented infrastructure and our culture of autonomy, flexibility, and innovation. Our new structure is heavily inspired by the Spotify organizational structure. The product and tech crew now comprises 5 squads and 5 chapters that are more closely aligned with our business unit objectives, and we have increased our scope of execution by focusing on feature domains rather than product domains.
Stiffness is thus a companion of death, flexibility a companion of life. — Lao Tzu
Squads
Each squad is an autonomous team that is comprised of engineers, QA engineers, product managers, and designers. A squad has no hierarchy and is tasked with moving the needle on key metrics that are aligned with business unit objectives. However, the way in which they decide to make a difference is completely up to them. Currently, we have 5 squads: Mutti, Community Retail Pharmacy (CRP), Business Level Data (BLD), Analytics, and DevOps.
Chapters
A chapter is a group of engineers that belong to a functional domain, e.g. front-end development. Chapter Leads directly manage chapter members and are responsible for fostering alignment and sharing knowledge across the chapter.
What We Work On
At any given point in time, each squad is building solutions that address the various needs of their respective business units, while chapters work to achieve strategic technological goals.
Business Level Data Squad
The BLD Squad works with technologies like Apache Nifi to create robust data pipelines enabling mPharma to ingest, clean, and process data in a scalable manner. The data pipeline is the backbone of mPharma operations and is constantly being innovated on. Using this pipeline, the BLD Squad is also able to create internal tools and integrations that help mPharma run more efficiently.
Analytics Squad
The Analytics Squad is building our analytics platform and increasing our ability to deliver deep insights into our data. The team uses smart data analysis and visualization in order to provide stakeholders with meaningful, actionable information.
Community Retail Pharmacy Squad
The CRP Squad is building the next generation of pharmacy management software. What started as a simple web form has transformed into a fully-featured tool that allows pharmacy owners and employees to manage all aspects of their business. This year, pharmacies using the software can expect to see increased data insights that will help optimize pharmacy operations, better UX, and the ability to use the software completely offline.
Mutti Squad
The Mutti Squad is constantly working to improve patients’ access to medication through the Mutti program. They use Python microservices and React + Redux front-ends to create tools that allow patients to pay for their medication over time through mobile money.
DevOps Squad
The DevOps Squad is responsible for creating a robust infrastructure and a seamless development experience for engineers. Whether it be maintaining our Mesos/Marathon environment or creating a new tool for our CI/CD pipeline, the DevOps Squad is there to support all the squads’ efforts and improve their experiences.
Moving Forward
As we move forward on our journey, we will share with everyone we can the challenges we face, our failures, and our successes. We will write about everything from the music we’ve been enjoying to how we’ve decided to deal with distributed transactions in a microservices architecture. We hope that you will find what we have to speak about interesting, and if you are ever interested in making a positive social impact with fun, smart people, we hope you apply for a job through the careers page of our website.
