Scaling up at Etsy

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Careers, Business, 907234, Technology

4.7 • 53 Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Global craft marketplace Etsy has grown at an impressive rate in recent years. From 2019 to 2021 sales and revenue tripled. This growth has been enabled by a significant technology modernization project which, amazingly, was completed just weeks before the Coronavirus pandemic erupted in March 2020, the start of a period in which millions of people took to Etsy to purchase cloth face masks. Without the modernized systems and infrastructure, Etsy would have struggled to cope with consumer demand.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike Mason is joined by Etsy's Chief Architect Keyur Govande, the company's former CTO Mike Fisher and Thoughtworks North America Technical Director Tim Cochran to discuss how Etsy tackled the challenge of scaling to meet the needs of its expanding market. They talk through the technical challenges and the organizational focus required to scale in a way that was sustainable for the business yet impactful for Etsy's users.

Read Tim Cochran's article about evolving Etsy's culture on martinfowler.com: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/etsy-product-delivery-culture.html

...And his piece on using the cloud to scale: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/etsy-cloud-scale.html

Learn more about Thoughtworks partnership with Etsy: https://www.thoughtworks.com/clients/retail-ecommerce/etsy-scaling

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the ThoughtWorks Technology Podcast. My name is Mike Mason, and I'm joined today by Tim Cochran, who is a tech director at ThoughtWorks, and he's currently running our Scale Up studio. Hi Tim. Hi, Mike. I'm super
0:24.6	excited to be here. Talk about this topic. Awesome. So the topic today is scaling Etsy. So
0:32.4	Etsy, everybody knows them. They are a global destination for unique and creative goods. Their core challenge is that
0:40.7	they have more than 100 million listings, and they need to connect 95 million buyers with 7.5 million
0:48.0	sellers. They tripled their gross merchandise sales and their revenue from 2019 to 2021.
0:54.6	So as you can imagine, that's quite a steep growth curve.
0:59.7	And we're joined today by two folks.
1:02.8	First of all, we have Keior Gavande, who is the chief architect and VP of engineering at Etsy.
1:09.1	Hello, Kior.
1:10.3	Hey, Mike. How's it going? Awesome. Thank you for,
1:13.6	thank you for being here today. And we have Mike Fisher. We're going to call him Fish to
1:18.6	avoid the confusion with me. Mike Fisher is the former CTO of Etsy. Hi, Mike.
1:23.6	Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Awesome.
1:29.8	So scaling Etsy. So we had a little taste of some of the numbers in terms of, you know, the amount of products sold and the revenue growth.
1:38.0	And I think we can all imagine that there's, you know, underlying infrastructure and technology growth to support that.
1:45.1	But I think we'll start the story back in 2017.
1:49.2	Fish, you joined Etsy as CTO in 2017.
1:53.9	Can you tell us a bit about, you know, your approach to looking at scaling as you arrived in the organization?
2:06.6	Yeah, I think our scaling story, at least for me, definitely starts in 2017. When I first arrived, there was a couple of things going on.
2:10.6	One, we anticipated we wanted to be able to really reignite growth.
2:16.6	So that was in the minds of folks in that time.
2:21.5	And there were definitely some areas that we felt were holding us back.
	...

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