Introducing the WW Tech Blog
By: Michael Lysaght
Tags: Software Development

Welcome to the WW (Weight Watchers Reimagined) Technology Blog

I’m honored to announce the launch of the WW (Weight Watchers Reimagined) technology blog, where we’ll share some of the amazing work our team is doing to enable the WW member and employee experience through technology.

Several years ago, WW decided to rethink how it used technology, and we have been on a remarkable journey ever since. At a high level, our tech transformation involved looking at everything from the programming languages we use, to how we ship code, to the tooling we provide our employees so that they can do their job. To understand how we got to this point, it’s helpful to know the history of technology at WW.

A brief history

In 2001, WW — then, Weight Watchers — started an online subscription business that was ahead of its time in many ways. The team built out a meaningful member experience delivered through a digital subscription service, but they also had to solve multiple back-office problems such as recurring billing, which was new for online businesses at that time. It’s impressive that as the dotcom bust was in full swing, WW successfully built this new business. Following up in 2009, the company launched the first version of its iOS app.

Even though this business was a massive success, all of us who work in technology know that software has a very short shelf-life. At a certain point, it became obvious that a new technology platform was needed. This gave us the impetus and momentum to not only look at the technology, but also many other areas of how we work as a technology organization. Upon announcing our multi-year transformation, we identified key areas for improvement within the technology group, including technologies, process, engineering excellence, talent, and culture.

Technologies

WW was historically a .Net and Oracle shop, which, despite being great and proven technologies, brought challenges, including cost and the complexity of hosting in the cloud. Given that we had the opportunity to reset the clock, it was a good time to reevaluate the technologies we were using. In early 2014, we decided that Scala, Node, Cassandra, Mongo, JavaScript/Angular, and, more recently, React, would allow us to embrace a more modern footprint with better support and tooling, specifically for rapid development. We’d be able to replace our older monolithic platform and build out new microservice architecture.

Moving from our data centers to the cloud was another key initiative. Embracing cloud and open source technologies allowed us to take advantage of the new economics of modern technology that other companies were already embracing. It also made a statement: Transformation wasn’t just some rogue engineer’s idea but something that was supported throughout WW, from the top down.

Process

At this time, WW was very much an SDLC/Waterfall organization. Production deployments were typically done on a semi-annual basis and usually involved downtime. As a result, our members were not receiving the level of innovation we were capable of delivering. The product and engineering teams didn’t sit together, and even within engineering, quality engineers weren’t grouped with software engineers. This made for a siloed organization and sub-optimal productivity.

As a result, at the beginning of 2016, we decided to go all-in on Agile development. There’s been a great deal of debate as to whether Agile is good or bad. It’s true that it is not a silver bullet and doesn’t solve all our problems — such as how to make sure our architecture is evolving — but it is a solid framework to ship meaningful services to our members on a regular basis. For areas that Agile isn’t designed to solve, we simply do what makes sense for us, essentially bolting on what makes us function better as a technology team, like architectural reviews.

Fortunately, many of us had worked in Agile environments before, so rather than relying on an external change management team to roll this out, we simply went about doing it ourselves in an organic fashion. We decided what the teams would be, developed the necessary structure, and created cross-functional scrum teams that sat together. Even though we had a bumpy start, we soon started seeing benefits from a delivery perspective.

Engineering excellence

To compete in the modern technology world, it was imperative to embrace modern engineering practices that result in delivering more functionality or features for our members with a higher level of quality. Automation has been our best friend on this front, so we set about automating as many manual or repetitive tasks as we could. Within eighteen months we were able to ship product on demand, including new app releases every couple of weeks.

To help us on this journey, we embraced new technologies, such as Kubernetes, Jenkins, XCTest, and Espresso, and also built our own CI/CD pipeline tool called Trigger, which allows us to inject quality automation and security into our pipeline as well as our operational environment. Combining this with our partnership with the product and design teams and an overall obsession with listening to and meeting our members needs, we have successfully moved the needle for member experience. This is reflected in our iOS app star rating, which jumped from 1 star to 4.8 stars over the past few years.

People

WW has a long history of outsourcing its development offshore. This worked well for some time, but modern customer-centric product philosophies suggested it would be better to have cross-functional teams co-located in the same space. Now the product manager and user experience teams who really know and understand our members sit next to the engineers and quality folks so that everyone is aware of our members’ needs.

WW also started focusing on attracting top talent to our San Francisco and New York City offices. In San Francisco, we acquired three amazing startups, created a startup-like office environment, and began adding extremely talented folks to the team. Today in San Francisco, we have a world class space with seating for just under 150 people. In New York City, we had a renewed focus on hiring and brought in similarly outstanding talent. Over the past three years, we have hired about 150 people to the technology team in both locations.

While we still rely on many partners to help us, this focus on hiring great people has been a pleasure to participate in and an amazing asset to WW. Offshore development, when done well, is effective, but we remain focused on hiring the right talent in our main offices. Today, with the advent of great technologies like Slack and Zoom combined with established processes, the need to be co-located, whilst not eliminated, is diminishing. Recently, we established a new Technology Hub in Toronto, and we also have a number of employees working remotely around the U.S.

Culture

Underpinning all of this, and in my opinion the most important change that’s happened at WW, was the shift in culture. Our goal was to create an environment where people would want to work. It needed to be fun and filled with passionate, diverse people who were technologically excellent. We wanted all of that, but with a human- and member-centric focus. At its core, WW is built around science and community. Our mission is to inspire healthy habits for real life. Hiring people who are inspired by and passionate about that mission is critical to ensuring that what we deliver is meaningful and reliable.

We create that culture in many ways, whether by assigning new graduates a mentor so that they have someone they can go to with a question or building cool spaces to work in (such as our NYC rooftop). The culture at WW has become something that we are very proud of and we will continue to nurture and develop.

Looking forward

We are excited to deliver multiple new, important features in the coming years, including meaningful personalization. This will allow us to leverage data and science to truly understand our members and meet them where they are, enabling us to provide the support that they need to achieve their goals. It’s an innovative and thrilling time at WW, and we’ll be using this blog to share details of our upcoming initiatives so that our work can inspire others.

Author: Michael Lysaght, Chief Technology Officer, WW

Michael Lysaght is the CTO of WW where he has global responsibility for all aspects of Technology. Since joining WW in 2014, he has been leading a major technology transformation, first within engineering and subsequently for all of technology. Prior to WW, Michael was vice president of engineering at SecondMarket (now Nasdaq Private Market), where he led the design, development, delivery, and quality of SecondMarket’s software products. Prior to SecondMarket, Michael spent 12 years working as an independent consultant at various institutions around the world building internet products for startup, financial, and telecoms companies.

Interested in joining theWW team? Check out our careers page to view technology job listings as well as open positions on other teams.