Jeremiah Ivan, VP of Engineering, Merrill Corporation In the span of 12 months Merrill was able to move from a monolithic and hard-to-change architecture to a fast-moving, agile development platform, enabled by the MongoDB database. We’ll talk about the technology, people, and process changes involved in the transformation. We hope that participants in this session will come away with the bits and pieces of a recipe for success that they can apply to their environment.

1. MongoDB for
Transformational Success
03/28/2017
Jeremiah Ivan, VP Engineering Merrill Corporation
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremiahivan/
Twitter: @jeremiahivan

2. P.A.L
• Purpose:
• Share a long time client’s perspective on how MongoDB truly wins in the
market with emphasis on what I’ve learned using MongoDB in both start up &
enterprise level transformation efforts
• Agenda:
• History: Seven Years - 2 Successes and 1 Incomplete for MongoDB
Transformation
• Importance of Presence: MongoDB’s Contribution to Organizational Success
• Serving Enterprise Specifically: Primacy of Transformation
• Understand Impact on Your Org: People, Process & Planning
• Length: 20 mins

3. Delivering Success: Our Shared Past & Present
• Who is Jeremiah Ivan
• Vocation:
• Product Owner of Engineering Performance aka “VP of Engineering”
• In Brief:
• Grad Carnegie Mellon ‘98, professional Engineer ‘98 - ’10.
• Drawn to the dark side of engineering management in 2010
• Key Areas We’ve Worked Together
• Snagajob.com from 2011 – 2014
• Outcome on Goals: Success
• Rent the Runway from 2014 – 2016
• Outcome on Goals: Success
• Merrill Corp present day
• Outcome on Goals: We’ll Know in October

4. Delivering Success: Our Efforts & Results
• Snagajob
• Startup : 10th overall hire, stayed 10 years. Senior Engineer -> VP Engineering
• MongoDB key role in first major effort as a Director of Engineering (2011/2012).
• Key Project : Total Rewrite and Rebrand of Core Property serving 35m UV a month
• Outcome: Success
• Decreased Response Time Avgs by 35% and brought API returns to 350 ms on average
• Increased SEO visit share lowering overall CPV
• Improved advertising targeting to increase RPV by 25% in following quarter
• Increased velocity YOY for Feature Teams by 28% and Lowered Defects per sprint by 34%
• Intro’d Daily+ Releases
• Other Highlights
• Building MongoDB Practice from Ground Up
• Robert Fehrmann team leader, later MongoDB Master class of 2016
• Our group founded Richmond MongoDB user group (2012) still active today
• 10 gen grabbed two of our engineers
• This code base and MongoDB lives on at Snagajob today

5. Delivering Success: Our Efforts & Results
• Rent the Runway
• Startup: Joined as consultant in summer of 2014 continued as VP of Engineering for 1 year.
• Key Project: Refactor and Improve Core Property for Speed, Facelift and Increased Mobile
• Outcome: Success
• Decreased Response Time on Page and in API Calls
• Increased Search Capabilities
• Unified API and revised Mobile App & Web UI lead to increase of team velocity and reduction in defects
• Increase avg shopping cart and decreased time to 1st purchase
• Achieved desired terms and valuation in late Series funding.
• Codebase still kicking
• Highlights
• Moving focus on Support and ownership of MongoDB to the internal teams
• Growing a team of engineers in MongoDB
• Merrill Corporation
• Enterprise: Joined as consultant in fall of 2015 and as VP of Engineering in January 2016
• Key Project: Refactor Core Property for Speed, Facelift and Increase Feature Capability
• Outcome: ???

6. Delivering Success: MongoDB’s Contribution
• The Tech
• Strong, clear, proven
• Conducive to Cloud
• But let’s be honest : There’s more than one way to store data
• People & Process
• Continues to be the Key to the MongoDB Difference
• Puts primacy on the client’s success against business requirements.
• Up front about the transformation effort needed
• DCE’s go deep, the best “go native” and deeply learn the clients requirements from a
Product and organizational standpoint.
• That process and those folks are why MongoDB will aid you in your transformation
• It’s simple but it’s rare, especially in Enterprise.

7. Delivering Success: Primacy of Transformation
• Key Points to Remember when an Enterprise considers MongoDB
• MongoDB, the Software, is only one small part of a successful transformation or innovation
effort within an Enterprise or Start Up
• An enterprise customer will likely have more tech talent gaps than a startup
• Although the talent gap is higher an Enterprise client will likely have stronger operational
and compliance requirements than a startup
• Leveraging People & Process
• Define Success for this Transformation/Innovation effort as clearly as possible
• Success is judged 2-3 months after Production delivery
• Clarify the gaps MongoDB can serve in terms of tech, people and process

8. Impacts on People,
Processing & Planning

9. MongoDB Impact: People, Process & Planning
• People (You’ll need to Staff UP)
• DBAs and transition
• Developers and transition
• Changing the way you consider operational capability
• If you’re not DevOps now; you will need to be
• Process (You’ll need to make changes)
• Change management, production awareness and the engineering team
• Production Support and Client Support
• Development: Consider hooks in your source control
• Planning (More changes with more opportunity)
• Very conducive to agile development
• Very easy to keep thinking relational, hobbling the performance and velocity possible

10. Thank you!
Jeremiah Ivan, VP Engineering Merrill Corporation
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremiahivan/
Twitter: @jeremiahivan

11. #MDBEvenings

12. June 20-21, 2017
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Chicago, IL
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