Meet the Supermetrics Product Development Team
Published: 2023-10-11 08:53:27


The Supermetrics products allow businesses to pipeline their marketing data from siloed sales and marketing platforms and manage, transform, and analyze that data to inform decision-making, optimize marketing efforts, and improve business results. 

It sounds simple, but when you factor in the scale we operate on, it isn’t. Around fifteen percent of global advertising is reported through our products. Every month, we transfer about 2.5 petabytes of marketing data from more than 150 sources through billions of queries.

It's a team effort to make all that happen. In this blog post, we'll introduce you to our Product Development organization, how it works, and which product areas each team owns.

## 100+ engineers, five product groups

Currently, our teams are divided into five product groups, each with their own set of responsibilities:

- The Connect Group owns the Supermetrics Connect product, focusing primarily on data pipelining.
- The Cloud Group builds our Marketing Intelligence Cloud platform, focusing on solutions like data warehousing and storage, data transformations, and data analysis.
- The Connectors Group develops third-party API integrations for fetching data from 150+ data sources and a platform for managing them.
- The Customer Lifecycle Group owns our licensing and payments services, internal support services and internal integrations with sales, marketing, and finance software.
- The Infrastructure Group encompasses DevOps, architecture, security, and developer experience. 

Each development team consists of people with various roles working together. Software Engineers and their Engineering Managers are paired with a dedicated Product Manager and Designer, and experts from fields like Test Automation, and DevOps are on hand when needed.

## How we work together

Each team has the autonomy to choose its ways of working. We share some working patterns to make internal communication and alignment easier and avoid siloing.

- Two-week sprints with retro meetings and daily standups either as a meeting or via Slack.
- We're agile and combine useful features from Scrum and Kanban to manage stories.
- Jira is our tool of choice for keeping tabs on tasks, epics, and the like. We plan each epic and discuss these plans across the organization to keep everyone on the same page.
- We prefer more communication over less. As the engineering organization grows and our products become more complex, teams must communicate with each other to avoid silos. We have an all-hands dev channel on Slack for discussing general technology issues and ideas.
- While different teams are for different things, all engineers at Supermetrics can contribute anywhere in the codebase. If you see a bug on another team's domain, you're welcome to submit a pull request and get the appropriate team member to review it.

## What technologies we use

Most of our backend code uses PHP, MySQL, and Redis. You might see some Go, Node.js, or Python, but that's more rare. We use these technologies locally in Docker containers. Our staging and production rely fully on cloud services provided by Google and Amazon.

Our frontend is based mostly on React, TypeScript, and Google App Script. Some projects still use Vue.js. We use REST APIs for communication.

Without going into further details, here's a short list of other tools we use in our daily work: Jira, Jenkins, GitHub, PHPStan, Psalm, Jest, PubSub, PHPUnit, and Kubernetes.

## Introducing our engineering groups and teams

### Connect Group

The Connect Group focuses on building and maintaining the data destinations to which Supermetrics pipelines data. We partner with and build functionality on top of widely used data analysis and visualization applications, like Google Sheets and Looker Studio.

The user workflow is very similar regardless of destination. You connect to one or more data sources, select the metrics and dimensions you want to pull into the destination application, configure things like date range and filters, and then click to request data. But since all the destination applications are unique, the Connect Group's development teams are specialized to work with specific data destinations.

The **Google Sheets and Excel team** develops our add-ons for Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. If you use the spreadsheet tools to gather stats from different sources, this product can save a ton of time, so you can focus on making sense of the data. 

The **Looker Studio and Power BI team** owns our extension to Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) and Microsoft Power BI which marketers use to create data visualizations, customizable visual reports, and dashboards.

### Cloud Group

The Cloud Group leads the charge on our new product strategy, where we expand beyond the data pipelining solution that has made Supermetrics successful in the past ten years. They’re building a product roadmap that will cover all the stages of the marketing data lifecycle, including exciting new fields like data storage, governance, and data transformations.  

The **Cloud Storage team** works with huge volumes of data. Supermetrics supports various data warehousing and data lake platforms, like BigQuery, Snowflake, Google Cloud Storage, and Amazon S3. Users can create their own schemas to pull specific data from multiple sources and automate transfers to their preferred data storage.

The **Cloud UI team** is a front-end focused team that develops tools for customer engagement, onboarding, and support. They’re dictating how customers interact with the solutions that make up the Supermetrics Marketing Intelligence Cloud. They’re obviously working very close to the customer, maintaining a tight feedback loop for developing the user experience.

The **Cloud Data team** builds core features like data blending and data transformation that allow customers to normalize and merge their marketing data from a multitude of marketing and sales platforms into meaningful formats for reporting and analytics.

### Connectors Group

A connector is an API integration that fetches data from various sources and processes it to match the user's request before sending it to a destination. The Connectors Group teams are responsible for these third-party API integrations and fetching data from those sources. 

The **Connectors Engineering team** maintains and migrates APIs within existing coded connectors. We currently have over 150 connectors, half of which are coded. It means they're written using actual code and need to be maintained and adjusted as the user base grows. 

The **Connector Platform team** owns the technology that allows us to build codeless connectors, which roughly make up the other half of our connectors. You can read more about them in this [tech blog post](https://dev.to/supermetrics/accelerating-api-integration-development-with-codeless-connectors-1bb4). Essentially, the Connector Platform allows us to create more and better connectors to data sources.

The **Connector Specialist team** uses the no-code configuration wizard built by the Connector Platform team to configure new Codeless Connectors. The Connector Specialists don't have to have coding skills. They only need to understand the API documentation and our configuration schema.

### Customer Lifecycle Group

The Customer Lifecycle Group owns mission-critical product areas. First, they ensure our customers have the right access levels to our systems, allowing them to use our products in a reliable and stable way. They also manage the ways customers buy and pay for our products and services. And finally, they own the integrations between our products and internal sales, marketing, and finance tools, aligning multiple systems’ work in a way that information is always synced and reliable.

The **Customer Lifecycle team** owns the purchasing flow and the licensing system. The products they build and maintain handle a part of every single request that comes through the system, both the load and the stakes are high, and the systems need to be performant and robust.

They also build and maintain integrations between our products and internal tools like our customer relationship management, business intelligence, and enterprise planning system. Part of their work is to improve the workflows and operation for internal stakeholders, like the Sales and Finance teams. 

### Infrastructure Group

The Groups and teams mentioned above focus on their product areas. The Infrastructure Group, on the other hand, operates cross-functionally and supports the work of other engineering groups and teams. These teams are:

- Security
- Developer Experience
- Architecture
- DevOps

## Our technology and engineering organization have expanded over time

Each Group and team offers a unique perspective and distinct technical challenges. What they have in common is that engineers can truly influence not just their own work but the evolution of the Supermetrics products and their technical implementation. All our teams are also made up of wildly talented and helpful colleagues.

---

We continue to grow and are looking for talented people to join our Engineering team. Explore career opportunities on our [Engineering careers page](https://supermetrics.com/careers/engineering).