Video and slides synchronized, mp3 and slide download available at URL http://bit.ly/1xVDwh3. Sri Viswanath shares the ideas and program driving Groupon’s engineering culture. Filmed at qconsf.com. Sri Viswanath joined Groupon as Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations in April 2013. Prior to joining Groupon, Sri was VP of research and development for mobile computing at VMWare.

1. Building Groupon’s Global
Engineering Culture
Sri Viswanath
SVP of Engineering and Operations, Groupon

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Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
http://www.infoq.com/presentations
/groupon-culture

3. Purpose of QCon
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Strategy
- practitioner-driven conference designed for YOU: influencers of
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Highlights
- attended by more than 12,000 delegates since 2007
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Presented at QCon San Francisco
www.qconsf.com

4. Groupon Growth

5. November 2008

6. 2008
10 Employees

7. 2010
300+ Employees

8. 2012
10,000+ Employees

9. Groupon is the
leader in local commerce,
making it easy for people around the world to search
and discover great businesses at unbeatable prices.
Source: Internal data,, June 2014
WORLDWIDE
250M+ subscribers nearly 53M active customers 500+ markets
$7b+ in annual billings 600M+ deals sold nearly 12,000 global employees

10. Building Groupon’s
Global Engineering Culture

11. behavior of humans within an organization and the
meaning that people attach to those behaviors.
Includes organization's vision, values, norms, systems,
symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs, and habits.
Org culture

13. Megamind
GoodsHotels
Freebies iTier
Gnome
SmartDeals
Seamless
Redemption
PULL
Snap
Sidetour
Shopping Cart CRM

15. Team Ethos

17. AutonomyConnection Excellence
Principles

18. GEEKon Global Internal Hackathon

19. GEEKon Global Internal Hackathon
275+ techies from 8 countries on 5 continents spent 96 consecutive hours hacking = 106 projects

20. GEMs Mentoring Program

21. By The Numbers
7
2
26 24
Seattle New York Chicago Palo Alto
59 Official Pairs

22. Mentor/Mentee Retro Feedback
Quoted Highlights.
• I liked that the mentor was entirely removed from mentee’s org tree.
• I learned different philosophies and work practices. I learned a different perspective on how to manage
frustrations.
• Slightly surprised at what I was able to share and that it was so high impact. I was able to add value in places I
didn’t expect to.
• This highlighted some of the org challenges to me; I was able to help increase competency in how to
work at a company like Groupon.
• It was good to have someone who followed up with me during a change of manager.

23. Build a real tech ladder

24. Innovation & Execution

25. I-Tier: Serving 25 Countries and Growing

26. Internal “open sourcing” – Eg: Skeletor

27. How do you create
a true Data Driven culture?

28. 2
6
We A/B Test ALL product features

29. Retrospectives

30. Results have been
very positive!

31. Groupon is no longer simply a “daily deals” merchant
but a technology company.
- GigaOm

32. Note: It’s a long journey

33. Sri@groupon.com
engineering.groupon.com

34. Watch the video with slide synchronization on
InfoQ.com!
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/groupon-
culture