The client
Adevinta is a global classifieds specialist with market-leading positions in key European markets. Its technology and teams connect buyers and sellers, helping people find jobs, homes, cars, consumer goods and more. Every day, Adevinta empowers millions of individuals to make sustainable choices and fight the war on waste. With trusted brands that enjoy leading market positions, Adevinta operates a resilient business model at the center of the second-hand economy, at a time when consumers are seeking more sustainable and cost-efficient ways to shop.
The situation
In June 2021, Adevinta completed the acquisition of eBay Classifieds Group (eCG). In 2022, Adevinta made remarkable strides in unifying the two organizations, Adevinta and eCG, to form an integrated company. As Adevinta progressed the integration with the aid of their talented employees, they ensured a seamless consolidation of their combined brands and markets.
Adevinta dedicated considerable effort to refining internal policies, processes and systems. Over time, their attention shifted towards harmonizing their organization's culture, uniting the team as a single cohesive entity. At the close of 2022, Adevinta publicly declared its intention to verticalize its marketplaces. This strategic move aligned with their growth strategy, focusing on Motors, Real Estate verticals, and Re-Commerce, and aims to streamline their organization while pursuing these key areas.
Among the four generalist platforms, namely Leboncoin, Kleinanzeigen, Subito, and Milanuncios, the objective was to create a new generalist solution as the base platform for all others, ensuring a cohesive and streamlined experience for users across borders.
Enabling the team for a seamless integration
Milanuncios was the first marketplace to integrate into the new generalist platform. Recognizing that other teams would undergo the same process, Milanuncios took on the responsibility of facilitating the onboarding and integration of other marketplaces and central teams into the new platform.
Thoughtworks’ task was to enable six teams from Milanuncios, comprising over 40 individuals, to seamlessly transition into the new generalist platform. Together with Milanuncios’ teams we created a comprehensive, well-structured and scalable plan for their onboarding and integration.
The challenge was creating an enablement plan that catered to developers with different levels and experience, from juniors to leads, while ensuring overall satisfaction.
When Thoughtworks joined the project, Milanuncios teams had already started a self-paced training on coding best practices in Spanish. To leverage their existing training efforts, Thoughtworks decided to align with their plans for the first few weeks, providing support by designing hands-on challenges based on the content they were covering.
In the second iteration, the new training was in English and already incorporated feedback from various teams to enhance the overall program. This iterative approach continued until the final version was delivered.
The program was separated into three phases:
Tech training: Initial phase focused purely on training the team members on the new generalist platform programming languages and frameworks (Golang, Typescript and NextJS).
Tech stack onboarding: In this phase, the main focus was to understand the tech stack (e.g. CI (continuous integration) tools, observability tools, repositories, etc.), processes, conventions, structure, architecture and communication mechanisms.
Scope and team onboarding: In the final phase, the onboarding team dedicated time with some members of the new generalist platform to decide and agree on the backlog, plus work on the first stories together until they felt comfortable with it.
Trainers are ready to train future teams
Throughout the process, Thoughtworks were expected to enable soon-to-be trainers from Milanuncios. Therefore, from the very beginning of the project, we collaborated closely with Milanuncios’ leaders, actively involving them in the trainer group to implement this effectively.
By establishing this onboarding process, Thoughtworks prepared a framework for future teams in need of similar support. This eliminates the need to create customized onboarding materials for each individual team, helping to save valuable time and providing them with greater freedom and efficiency in the operations.
After successful completion of the onboarding process, the Milanuncios teams are now fully equipped to guide and onboard the next set of teams. Their expertise and experience will play a crucial role in seamlessly integrating the work of these teams into the new generalist platform. This milestone marks an exciting step forward, paving the way for continued growth, collaboration, and innovation within the new generalist platform ecosystem.
Outcomes:
A total of 16 backend and six frontend engineers were enabled in the new generalist platform
One backend and one frontend engineer from Milanuncios took on training roles to onboard future teams
Creation of a Welcome Pack built for the future trainees to use when integrating other marketplaces with the new generalist platform
Around 160 people globally have already onboarded, and a further 80 are in progress. Most of these individuals are using the Welcome Pack built
We chose Thoughtworks because of their expertise in software engineering, their years of experience in agile culture and the great relationship we currently have in other areas of Adevinta. Since the beginning it was clear there is a cultural-fit between both companies and teams. The combination of transparency, quick action upon feedback and openness to adapt was key to improve this onboarding experience. It exceeded our expectations.
