apidays Australia 2022 - Enabling Business Networks September 14 & 15, 2022 Guardianship Model - Managing digital hypergrowth at scale Souvik Mukherjee, Head of Technology, WooliesX ------------ Check out our conferences at https://www.apidays.global/ Do you want to sponsor or talk at one of our conferences? https://apidays.typeform.com/to/ILJeAaV8 Learn more on APIscene, the global media made by the community for the community: https://www.apiscene.io Explore the API ecosystem with the API Landscape: https://apilandscape.apiscene.io/ Deep dive into the API industry with our reports: https://www.apidays.global/industry-reports/ Subscribe to our global newsletter: https://apidays.typeform.com/to/i1MPEW

1. Guardianship Model
Managing Digital Hypergrowth
API Days Australia
September 2022

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3. We would like to acknowledge the Traditional
Custodians of the various lands on which we all work
today and pay our respects to Elders past, present &
future.

4. Souvik Mukherjee
Souvik Mukherjee
Head of Technology | WooliesX
API Enthusiast | Software Engineer | People Leader
Traveller | Wine Lover 🍷

5. 4
WooliesX Digital Ecosystem Hypergrowth
EverydayX
TechX
ConnectedX eComX
+22%
Digital
Traffic
vs F21
+22%
Active
Customers
vs F21
+42%
eCom B2C
sales
vs F21
+70%
Active
Rewards
App users
vs F21
Underpinned by strong technology foundations
Grew weekly users of Woolworths app by
53%
Real-time loyalty platform roll out –
enabling real-time points earning and
discovery of personalised products for
reward members.
Delivery unlimited B2C paid customers
doubled vs F21
Uber Eats & Metro60 convenient
propositions launched
Everyday Pay launch within
Woolworths Supermarkets, Metro
Food Stores and BigW
Everyday Market launch provides
customers with a curated online
marketplace experience
WooliesX F22 Performance

6. 5
4x increase of Microservices footprint over two years at WooliesX
Impact of digital hypergrowth on technology
Growth faster than maturity
Poor customer experience
Impact on delivery velocity Reduced Team Health

7. 6
A unique solution developed at WooliesX: Guardianship Model
WooliesX adopted a unique approach to solving the hypergrowth challenges
Growth faster than maturity
Poor customer experience
Impact on delivery velocity Reduced Team Health
Customer Centricity
Inner-sourcing
Service Maturity Model
Healthy Foundations

8. 7
Guardianship Model starts with WooliesX Team First Culture
We create better experiences together for a better tomorrow
Dedicated 20% of time allocated to every individual to
progress in career, build capabilities & standards,
innovate and nurture thought leadership
Chapter Time
Creating a connected engineering community,
enabling growth, innovation and mastery while
building a clear connection to our purpose and vision.
Connection and Purpose
We are not driven by job descriptions or RASCIs; we
are an inclusive team who thrives for the greater good;
it starts with “WE” – all of us working together
Ownership
Valuing partnership to create meaningful moments
both big and small to make positive impacts on the
lives of teams, customers, communities and partners
Better Together

9. 8
Guardianship Pillars: Customer Centricity
Guardianship Model: An overview
Voice of Customer (VoC) & NPS
Break down VoC & NPS to analyse trends
across various categories like usability,
product availability, checkout,
responsiveness etc. and create focus
groups to tackle those issues every week
Industry Benchmarking
Benchmark and analyse mobile and
desktop website performance against the
industry (AU Retail) against availability,
performance, action duration, speed index
etc. every week
Service Domain mapping
Adopting Domain Driven Design (DDD) with
clearly defined bounded context aligned to
VoC and NPS components.
Squad Ownership
The squads are aligned to the sub-
domains, and each squad owns all the
microservices belonging to that sub-
domain.
Application catalogue
Adoption of Backstage IO to create
discoverability. Each microservice is
associated with its own CI, mapped to
repositories, owners and service domains.

10. 9
Guardianship Pillars: Service Maturity Model
Guardianship Model: An overview
Service Maturity Model - Framework
The Service Maturity Model (SMM) is a framework to assess the maturity of the
services against predefined standards and best practices before production
readiness.
Tech Debt Management
The variance between actual and expected maturity scores results in a quantified
amount of ”Tech Debt”, creating visibility, priority and a quantified mechanism to
manage risk within the business.
Architecture & Design | Source Control | Test
Automation | CI/CD Automation | DX | Availability |
Observability | Reliability | Team Health
Service Engineering Non-Negotiables
Business criticality defines the expected level of service maturity for a particular
service creating a standard “Engineering Non-Negotiables” checklist for the squads.
This helps shift quality left, reduce story estimation surprise and standardize
serviceability of services.
Pillar 1
Pillar 2
Pillar 3
Pillar 4

11. 10
Guardianship Pillars: Inner Sourcing
Guardianship Model: An overview
Inter Squad Warranty Support
Post-release warranty support mechanism
from ”non-guardian” squads for the service
guardians for a duration mapped to the
incident management process
Change Management
Clear standards and guidelines for making
changes to source code by a “non-guardian”
contributor with a pre-defined workflow,
documentation standards and knowledge
transfer process
Service Repository Domain Nomenclature
Nomenclature alignment between Service
Domains, repositories for services and services
within those repositories
Service Repository Catalogue
Cataloguing services and their corresponding
repositories, guardians and criticality using
backstage IO
Access Management
Role-based access management to
repositories along with an ongoing UAM
process
Config Item Repository Mapping
Mapping each CI within Service Now to the
services and their corresponding repositories
Anyone within the organisation must be able to make changes to any services in compliance to the standards
Parallelism is improving
time to market and
minimising inter-squad
dependencies for feature
development

12. 11
Guardianship Pillars: Healthy Foundations
Guardianship Model: An overview
Healthy Foundations is needed for sustainable growth and building trust with our customers and team
Tech Debt Reduction
Embedding Changes
Managing Team Wellbeing
Focus on clearing the
operational and technical
legacy that creates
instability in our platforms
Tech Debt Reduction Embedding Change
Embedding new
capabilities making it
easier for our teams to
achieve business
outcomes
Team Wellbeing
Focus on creating a
capability framework and
development plans for
every individual enabling
growth and role clarity

13. 12
Guardianship Model: Learnings so far
Focus on people and culture creates a sustainable competitive advantage
Healthy Foundations
Having a capability framework with a
clear career ladder and development
plan creates a higher degree of
ownership
Inner Sourcing
The technology aspect of Inner-
Sourcing is easy. Processes to manage
changes and incidents post
deployment needs a definition upfront
Service Maturity Model
Customer Centricity
Creates a great sense of purpose and
clarity for the squads, very functional
and works well across stakeholders
SMM was vastly accepted by the
engineering community; however, we
could not find a consistent way to link
tech debt to business risks

14. 13
Guardianship Model – Next Steps at WooliesX
Bedding down the guardianship model across the organisation
Align the service domains to
the VoC across the
customer journey map and
lifecycle of customers
Customer Centricity
The maturity of the services
is directly proportional to
the maturity of the squads
who guardians the services.
The SMM needs to account
for the maturity of squads.
Service Maturity Model
Further, refine the change
management, release
management and incident
management processes for
inner-sourcing model
Inner-sourcing
Dedicated time allocated to
reduce tech debt in the
organisation. Having a clear
prioritization framework to
manage tech debt and
quantify value realizations
Healthy Foundations
01 02 03 04

15. 14
Thank you