MoneySupermarket has spent the last 3 years going through a major technology transformation. They've re-platformed their legacy .NET stack to a modern, cloud-based, event-driven platform. They've embraced agile methodologies and techniques whilst operating in a regulated industry. As the migration comes to an end, MoneySupermarket are ready to innovate on their new platform, which involves taking their agile ways of working to the next level. Find out what worked well, what didn’t - and what they are trying next.

1. Building tomorrow today: an agile journey
David Halsey
Pete Hanlon
May 2017

2. 2
£1.8B
SAVINGS
2016 estimated total
savings by the UK
1993
We started out life as mortgage 2000
£316M
Revenue 2015
920
Providers
22M
Adults chose to share
their private data with us
23m
Estimated unique
monthly users in 2015

3. 3
UK’s largest independent comparison site
2016 FY revenue £285M
7M average monthly unique users
6M Savers
UK’s biggest consumer advice website
2016 FY revenue £37M
14M average monthly unique users
Subscriber database +12M
Leading travel metasearch site
2016 FY revenue £22M
3M average monthly unique users
1M Savers

4. 4
2013 we were winning but
the journey was getting
harder
• Highly competitive market
• Increasing regulation
• Big ambitions
Technology was the
elephant in the room

5. 5
2013 Technology Challenges
• No time to reset
• Waterfall processes
• Monolith architecture
• Lack of automation
• High risk releases
• Environment issues
• Servers were pets
Too hard to innovate

6. 6
Platform For The Future
• Things that take weeks take days
• Things that take days take hours
• Things that take hours take minutes
What We Wanted
• Platform that can evolve
• Cloud ready / Cloud agnostic
• Automate everything
• The right tech for the job
• Back office #1 class citizen

7. 7
Archifest
• Share the problem
• Involve everyone
• Shared solution
Hearts and Minds
• Grass routes change
• Change advocates
• Hackathons/Spikes
• Generate a buzz

8. 8
Technologies
• Appropriate technologies
• Free Open Source
• Open licensing
Process
• Agile Ways of Working
• Tribes/Squads/Chapters/
Guilds
• Inline Dev Ops
People
• Training academies
• Practice Coaches

9. 9
SPA / Content Management
Micro Services
Enterprise Data
Warehouse
Data Lake
Cloud Platform
Back Office
Content Squads
Services Squads
Data Squads
Core DevOps
Back Office Squads
We organized around
platform
• Platform Thinking
• Consistency of
approach
• Clear separation of
concerns
• Communication
across the tiers was
essential
Legacy
GTX/AI Squads

10. 10
Lessons Learned
• We were too Brave, don’t
start with the biggest
revenue generator
• We changed the tech and
product at the same time
• We ramped up some of
our squads too quickly.
Needed to focus more on
Ways of Working

11. 11
Where we are in the journey
- We’ve done the hard work
- Fully automated platform
- Complete rebuild 4h
- Microservices
- Content Managed
- 1800+ servers
- 27 environments
- Automated tests 2000+
- Metrics 250,000+
The platform is working but to fully leverage it we need to pivot

12. 12

13. 13
The move from building a platform to leveraging a platform
changes four things ……
Organisation
Ways of working
Behaviour
Leadership

14. 14
Firstly, how we organise
Customer Technology
Diverse teams Specialist teams
Innovation Efficiency
over
over
over

15. 15
We need different ways of working
Products Projects
Discovery Phased roll-out
Collective code
ownership
Individual
code ownership
over
over
over

16. 16
Our behaviour has to change
Collaboration Reporting
Solving customer
problems
On-time, on-budget
over
over

17. 17
And finally, we need to task the team differently
Outcome Output
Context Control
over
over

18. 1818