The Coronavirus pandemic has brought new challenges when it comes to collaboration, but Pedro has come up with creative ways for the team to stay connected.
“Since COVID-19 started, we’ve begun gaming together every Friday for an hour or two. We love to play Call of Duty and Apex Legends,” says Pedro, the Head of Engineering Car Parts at OLX Motors.
For Pedro and the team, these gaming sessions have great importance.
“We need to go to battle together, maybe disagree with one another, but win together. This is one way we build trust and comradery. We have to stay engaged and enthusiastic about work. Gaming together has become a source of energy for us.”
In our discussion with Pedro, we talk more about keeping up the energy, his thoughts on engineering today, and all the great plans at OLX.
Know where you stand in order to scale
OLX Group is part of Prosus (and Naspers) and owns products and platforms that serve over 300 million people every month across the globe. Its Lisbon hub is home for the Motors vertical, where the teams create Europe’s leading destinations for buying and selling new and second-hand cars, car parts, motorcycles, and much more. As part of the OLX Group, which operates more than 20 brands across 30 countries, OLX Motors combines the agility of a startup with the maturity of a global entity. Needless to say, Pedro’s work at OLX Group gets complex.
The average car buyer used to visit five dealerships. Though online research has changed the process, buyers still spend hours at dealerships before buying a car. And the negotiation process can get overwhelming. For sellers, hurdles exist as well. It’s hard to know the true value of a car and find potential buyers.
From using machine learning price recommendation models to provide sellers with the best, most accurate, and most updated car price recommendations to building new user experiences like offering financing options for car buyers and integrating offline inspections for car sellers, OLX Motors is becoming an end-to-end solution for car buying and selling.
Pedro and the car parts team are working hard to scale OLX Motors. Scaling is crucial to the company’s success because:
- OLX platforms operate on a large scale. Every single month, 300 million people use the OLX platforms to easily, safely, and conveniently find their perfect home, buy or sell a car, find a great job, sell things they no longer need or strike a great deal on something they need. For example, “OLX image service gets more than 30,000 image requests per second, so we must scale effectively,” says Pedro.
- The taxonomy of cars and car parts gets complex. As Pedro states, “You don’t want a customer to order the wrong car part. We want customers to see only the car parts that are compatible with their cars.”
- OLX platforms need strong APIs. Greater capability here allows the platforms to communicate externally and internally via APIs to allow, for example, external suppliers to upload all their car parts in bulk to the platforms, manage inventory, and monitor performance.
Team at OLX
The auto-complete story and the importance of culture
Pedro, Head of Engineering Car Parts at OLX Motors
At one of the OLX Hackathons, Pedro and his team saw a huge opportunity to make the auto-complete feature of the platform more efficient by rebuilding it as a service on top of static data (and without relying on the main search engine).
This all happened on the spot.
“My Site Reliability Engineer came to me and suggested the idea. Minutes after, we rushed into the meeting room and were like, ‘Team! Let’s take over the auto-complete of Europe. We then got to work!’ tells Pedro.
Weeks later, the team released the revamped auto-complete micro-service. Over the months, they saw a significant increase in the engagement metrics and they also reduced the 99th Percentile response time in half.
“To me, this story shows the freedom of the culture here. If someone identifies an opportunity to capture or sees a problem to solve, you have the freedom to go for it.”
For Pedro, this freedom to seize opportunities as they arrive is one of the best aspects of working at OLX. It keeps team members engaged and ready to contribute.
Serendipity is defined as “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way”.
Personalize everywhere and add some serendipity
Before working with the Engineering Car Parts team, Pedro worked for the personalization team at OLX. The team was called Discovery and they created a personalized home feed for buyers.
“The team built a recommendation system based on collaborative filtering. In a couple of European countries, there was no personalized home feed. We saw a real opportunity here to unlock hidden value for our customers. What my team did was build off what we had. We created the frontend for the home feed, built the datasets for Europe, and released it as an A/B test for our customers.” details Pedro.
The results? The Discovery team achieved a 13% increase in replies (buyers replying to sellers on items sold). That’s significant when you have millions of customers.
“OLX is really dependent on knowing the behaviour of our customers and coming up with better recommendations for them when they’re buying and selling online. By designing experiments and continuously optimizing the recommendation model, we truly unlock the value of our data.”
As part of the optimization process for recommendations, Pedro and the team took steps to not funnel users in certain categories and get them stuck there.
“Just because a person is looking for a bike one month doesn’t mean all they want to see is content on bikes,” attests Pedro.
That’s a great point. So, what’s the solution? According to Pedro, one way is to add a squeeze of randomness. “We added the variable of serendipity to make the experience more engaging. There must be happy spontaneity occurring on the OLX platform. For example, perhaps you’ve been searching for sports gear, but the home feed decides to add a lamp to your feed. You weren’t on the platform to buy a lamp, but it looks nice and you click on it to find out more.”
Creating serendipitous encounters like that helps the OLX platform keep users energized and engaged. They won’t get bored, as something exciting may pop in their feed at any moment.
Understand your source of energy
Pedro has been with the OLX Group since the early days. Throughout that time, he’s come up with a variety of ways to recharge.
“I can’t be in a slow environment. I need constant movement, and sometimes I even need chaos. My thing is intense sports. I do explosive training to rejuvenate myself, and I plan to get into kickboxing next.” says Pedro.
Recharging goes beyond getting outside for an adventure. Pedro also spends a lot of time studying management and connecting with leaders in the engineering industry. He’s even created his own podcast about leadership.
“On my podcast, we talk with leaders from different backgrounds and hear inspiring stories of both success and failure. There are many different styles and ways to lead. I want to show people how the same problem can be approached differently based on your leadership style. You have to do what fits you and your team.”
On the Engineering Car Parts team, Pedro has done great work implementing a culture that works for him and the team. He makes sure the team always stays charged.
“One more thing: If you ever have time, listen to this song by the Nightcrawlers. If you ever feel lethargic during a day, put this song on. It will boost your energy!”
Claim back your schedule
“People have their own lives and responsibilities, so work flexibility is important. We also need to place limits on our work. We need a set schedule so we don’t burn out or waste time,” states Pedro.
With more team members working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, OLX Group has placed extra importance on health and wellbeing.
“We have squad health checks to see how each team member is doing. We’re messaging constantly to ensure communication remains strong. And we do employee surveys so that we can have a more general understanding and take action where needed.”
These efforts extend to ensuring the home work environment is designed to keep up the energy.
“We’ve given people ergonomic chairs, large monitors, and other things to make work from home comfortable. This is all in an effort to help people work well. This way, they can live well too.”
And for Pedro, living well involves intense sports, as well as relaxing and having fun with friends.
“I like cooking meals for friends and having dinner together. I’ve just always liked being around people. That’s how I’ve been since I was a child.”
This article was originally posted at OLX blog on 8th October.
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