Enabling a food delivery giant's technical architecture evolution
We helped delivery giant Just Eat reduce risk and increase platform reliability and internal efficiency during a time of enormous organic growth.
Challenge
Just Eat is an online food order and delivery retail platform operating in the United Kingdom and six other European countries. At the time of our engagement, Just Eat’s platform, which acts as an intermediary between independent food outlets and customers, had experienced enormous organic growth and success. Over time, however, the business’ platform had started to suffer from reliability issues.
Challenges included:
- The platform’s unstable architectural foundations and the level of complexity of its various components.
- Architectural and technical decisions being made at the product team level, preventing standardization and the ability to reap platform-level benefits.
- While the platform was in the process of moving to an event-driven architecture, allowing for mode decoupling and independence, strategic technical decisions were still not being orchestrated efficiently.
- Tech leadership at product level did not have a common forum or the required architectural leadership needed to guide their efforts.
Solutions
Beyond saw the need to guide Just East towards more stable architectural grounds. Our approach:
- We created an Architect Guild, comprising a Lead Architect, Enterprise Architect, Data Architect, Mobile App Architect and Business Analyst.
- This group interacted with product development teams, as well as the reliability engineering, data, AI, and security teams.
- We assisted these key stakeholders to establish a technical governance model.
- This model was used to direct internal engineering efforts, oversee platform decisions, create technical blueprints, establish standards and de-risk the modernization program.
Impact
With the establishment of the Guild, for the first time product teams had a common channel in which they could communicate, as well as well-defined guidance for decision-making and evolving the platform.
Thanks to these shared standards, product teams would propose architectural changes and enhance them before submitting them to the Guild.
As a result, teams’ internal efforts became more efficient and their results were maximized.
In a constantly evolving market, we need to differentiate our product to maintain our position as the very best in our industry and continue on a course of growth. Collaborating with Beyond enabled us to transform our product experience and strategically ensure that the customer remained at the heart of everything we do.
Fernando Fanton, former CTO at Just Eat
