In a recent interview, Jenny Warnke shared her experience leading engineering teams at Delivery Hero. She spoke about the engineering culture at Delivery Hero, the exciting challenges she and her team are tackling, and her approach to measuring success in the software development process.
Who is Jenny Warnke?
I am a Director at Delivery Hero with an extensive engineering background spanning more than 13 years of experience in software development. Before joining Delivery Hero, I spent about five years at PayPal and two years as Head of Engineering at Blacklane.
Building and scaling a successful engineering team
When a new team is formed, it helps if the engineering manager already has some domain knowledge, is familiar with the company, and can ensure that the team embodies the company culture. Success at building and scaling teams always start with good documentation; The better your engineering team documents their processes, the easier it is to be productive day-to-day and scale or onboard new team members.
“In the Fintech Department at Delivery Hero, we frequently collaborate with our local brands to integrate key solutions and align on goals. We have regular check-ins, and make sure that we discuss blockers while on the way to developing the right solutions.”
I believe it is essential for everyone to have a growth mindset, as well as the ability to take ownership – no matter the role or level. Also, the highest-performing teams are diverse. Diversity, in my opinion, is not just about different backgrounds and genders but includes having the right mix of technical and soft skills.
Key topics and challenges
As we continue to grow, we are scaling our team and the supporting architecture. So scalability is a major topic for us. To ensure that we are creating compliant, accurate, and secure solutions, some of the biggest challenges we have to deal with are:
- How many transactions or orders can we handle per minute?
- How can our database handle the transaction load?
- How can we develop proper data flows and reporting?
- How do we best train and educate our engineers to succeed at work?
To overcome these challenges, we are constantly learning and iterating on our processes and best practices.
Measuring success in the software development process
At Delivery Hero, quality testing is part of the product delivery flow. It is never an afterthought but fully integrated into the process — from planning to implementation. Within my team, I expect engineers to have a quality mindset — this means that it is always top of mind in testing, implementation, or rollback. All tasks and projects require proper testing and a secure environment which must be compliant in the development process to ensure success.
For example, when developing new features, we always make an impact or risk assessment to understand if the solution will include technical debt. If yes, we ensure this is taken care of by having a list of the main technical debts, a plan on how to tackle this, and how long it will require to fix it.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to delivering value to the end customer, and the way we provide value should be iterative and impactful, including the risk assessment of what’s being deployed, followed by an awareness of the value. Our Fintech team still has plenty of opportunities to deliver different or new value to our customers. Ultimately, we want our tech teams to reflect the diversity of our customers so that we can continue to build products that our customers love.
If you like what you’ve read and you’re someone who wants to work on open, interesting projects in a caring environment, check out our full list of open roles here – from Backend to Frontend and everything in between. We’d love to have you on board for an amazing journey ahead.
