Apr 29, 2020
Sonder Response
6yThank you for sharing your feedback. It is always useful to hear different perspectives on how Sonder is doing, especially as we navigate the exceptional circumstances which have been presented by the Covid-19 situation.
Engineering at Sonder is undergoing rapid change and the best response to the concerns raised in your feedback is probably just to list initiatives which are in progress or have been recently completed, as well as highlight how owning our own ecosystem has been an execution advantage during the Covid-19 crisis. Here goes, in no particular order:
Teams continue to think through, plan, and execute roadmaps in the context of domain boundaries. This quarter we launched 3 micro-services which overhaul how we handle invoice generation, complex taxes, and revenue recording, representing an important milestone in the larger overhaul of our financial recording systems.
We have selectively focused in on monolith performance metrics, which resulted in optimization of monolith database queries; and combined with an audit of database instance sizing, has resulted in performance improvements of 30% to 40%.
A continuing multi-stage effort to migrate from Heroic to Kubernetes on AWS. This is a complex migration which should be completed this year. New services already run in AWS.
Like many start-ups, there was a "move very fast" phase in which tech debt was built up in the monolith. The important highlight here is that these issues have been highlighted and are being worked on in a series of incremental improvements. Recent initiatives here include a focus on test coverage, writing better tests, establishment of end-to-end tests for important flows; and selective refactoring to enforce domain boundaries within the monolith itself, as a pre-requisite to further decomposition.
As the Covid-19 crisis started to take hold, one thing that emerged was Sonder's ability to act quickly and pivot its technology and engineering team around mitigation efforts -- initiatives like changes to our cancellation policy, pricing strategies, and a focus on longer stays were implemented quickly and with few build-in constraints. Having to achieve the same in the fragmented world of hospitality SAAS products would have been much less efficient once one moved beyond basic use cases. The resulting initiatives have enabled Sonder to dramatically outperform hotels during this time. And we do expect this control over our ecosystem to yield larger benefits as we move beyond our own basic use cases -- as it's still quite early in this space.
Change is hard, often gradual, and even more difficult under duress. I would invite you to reach out if you feel comfortable discussing your experience in more detail, via hrbp@sonder.com. We would love to learn more about how we may further empower change. Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts.