Meet our Development Teams: Autopsy

Team Autopsy builds A/B testing and fully automated optimization tools to improve both short and long term performance for our customers. Its name, while sounding ominous, is actually an acronym for the words automation and optimization. As one of the oldest development teams at Smartly.io, Autopsy is redefining its focus and cleaning up some of its historical burden, all the while working on an exciting new project.

Building a new tool for A/B testing

“We’re now in the process of finding a product/market fit for a completely new A/B testing solution,” says Lauri, the team lead for Autopsy. “Our mission is to make A/B testing as easy as humanly possible for our users. While we use advanced Bayesian modeling in the backend, we want the tool to be super simple to use.”

Autopsy is an inspiring example of how an old team with lots of history can reinvent itself and kick off a new project. “It’s exciting to get to plan a fresh tool from scratch,” Lauri says. “We’re building something that doesn’t exist yet, which means that we have a huge responsibility in figuring out what is the best way to go about building it.”

Working closely with the most advanced customers

In their quest to find the product/market fit, the team spends a lot of time talking to customers and gaining an understanding of their needs. Lauri recently got back from a three-week stint in San Francisco, where he met with some of the most advanced Smartly.io customers. “Many of our largest customers visit our Helsinki office on a regular basis, too, and all of our team members get to meet them and workshop with them to solve their most painful problems,” Lauri says.

“Our biggest challenges at the moment have to do with prioritization and finding a balance between product development speed and writing scalable and sustainable code,” Lauri says. “While we want to produce value to the customers on a weekly basis, we don’t want to resort to quick fixes.”

Thanks to its close cooperation with customers to plan the A/B testing product, customer centricity is an important prerequisite for thriving in team Autopsy. “You have to be keen to understand the business and solving the customers’ problems,” Lauri says. “Being excited about solving technical problems only gets us so far.”

Refactoring the old backend with modern technologies

Team Autopsy is home to six developers: Sergey, Dmitry, Dalibor, Andrey, Jan, and Lauri are all experienced full stack engineers. They’re refactoring the old PHP backend with TypeScript and NestJS, and the old Angular frontend with React. The team works closely together with their product manager Martti, collaborating on projects and avoiding lonely work. Autopsy is also looking for a new team member: a backend/fullstack engineer, who is self-driven and excited to turn customer feedback into well-functioning solutions.

In six month’s time, team Autopsy hopes to be finished with the A/B testing project and planning its roadmap ahead. “It’s a nice place to be in: working on something new and fundamentally different, but at the same time knowing you won’t be married to that project indefinitely,” Lauri says. “It’s rewarding to be able to define a new direction for the team and the product we’re working with”.

Learn more about how developers work at Smartly.io.

Originally published at https://www.smartly.io.