Bukalapak Engineering 2019 Mid-Year Review: 31 new products & 4500+ feature improvements

The first half of 2019 was the most productive semester ever for Bukalapak Engineering, with more products and feature improvements being launched for our customers than the whole 2018 combined. I am continuously amazed by the 600-engineers team at Bukalapak for their collaboration in reaching this exciting velocity. As we move to the second half of the year, I want to reflect on the journey, impact, and #GotongRoyong that our team had in reaching this point.

Launching 31 new products

At Bukalapak, we love to experiment with new products that can improve the livelihood of our customers. Not only this is part of our core strategy in competing within the hyper-growth market but also to leverage the massive customer base that we have in order to drive impact to tens of millions of Indonesians quickly. Our data shows that products being launched at Bukalapak can reach the level of active users that will take years to reach had they been launched as an independent product outside of Bukalapak. This enables us to rapidly experiment with new product ideas and see which one drives strong traction and impact.

In the first half of 2019, we've launched 31 new products, most of them coming from tribes that explore new product concepts beyond e-commerce marketplace. Some samples of these products:

Multiply the above samples by a factor of ten, and the sheer output of the whole product engineering team becomes evident. But the 31 new products are actually a minority of the outputs that the team had come up within the past 6 months. The majority of outputs are being channeled towards improving our wide set of existing products and features.

Releasing 4500+ feature improvements

In average, for every single workday Bukalapak releases 35 new feature improvements to our customers. A single feature improvement usually involves revamping the user experience for a screen or page for an existing product at Bukalapak. For example, revamping the user experience for BukaReksa to ease up navigation and help customers in making their informed purchasing decisions:

The 4500+ feature improvements being released are the #GotongRoyong ("mutual collaboration" in Bahasa Indonesia) output of more than 70 product squads within Bukalapak. Supporting seamless and quality release to our customers at this massive scale are thousands of automated integration tests across all platforms. This enables us to scale to more than 950 service deployments for our hundreds of microservices in the same time period, averaging 7.2 deployments per work day.

Structuring the engineering organization for velocity

As we scale up from 100 to 1100 tech talents in just three years, and since achieving high velocity in trying out new product ideas has always been integral to our strategy in surviving the hyper-competitive market of e-commerce in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, we always structure our tech organization towards a horizontal model that empowers teams to build and experiment with their set of products by themselves.

This empowerment reach a level where teams can go ahead and build their products and services by themselves even if it impact the scope or flows of other teams, as long as they inform the other team, put what they've built under A/B test, and monitor all the KPI metrics relevant to the affected teams. The importance of our self-built A/B testing platform and the experimental culture to the scalability of our engineering organization and velocity cannot be understated. It turns around the perspective and territoriality that naturally comes from owning a product into a healthy and objective data-driven decision making.

This culture resulted in a lot of significant impact in the past that wouldn't come to the surface if the teams are not being empowered to drive their ideas in a bottom-up manner. An example can be read in this post at our blog, where a team that comes up with their own initiative to improve the revenue generated by a product that belongs to a separate team at a different tribe, were empowered to do the change as long as they track all the relevant metrics for that team. The result was an increase of US$1 million in revenue being generated from that product.

Heading towards the second half of 2019

The second half of 2019 will bring large changes to Bukalapak as we ramp up our efforts towards Harbolnas (the Indonesian Black Friday sales period) in December. In addition, most of our engineers will move to a new office building in the south part of Jakarta, hopefully fostering stronger exchange of ideas and collaboration compared to the present situation where we are spread over more than a dozen offices.

Changes are an inevitable course in life, but all changes also accompanied by exciting opportunities, so if all these sounds like something exciting for you, check out our career site and reach out to us!