Session Title Building a Global environment at Merpay: India & Japan Robert Jerovsek Keigo Andrade Sumil Panicker

Robert Jerovsek Hailing from the small European country of Slovenia, Robert started programming in primary school. Apart from Slovenia, he has worked in Spain as the CTO of an EdTech startup and in South Korea, where he moved to tackle new challenges. Robert joined Merpay in 2018 as a Backend Engineer, but now works as an Engineering Manager (EM) and Manager of Managers (MoM) to make Merpay even better. Engineering Manager Keigo Andrade Keigo typed his first programs on an old MSX as a teenager, and never stopped coding and refactoring, following a path in Software Engineering and Management, including some experience as an entrepreneur. Keigo worked in Brazil and Germany before finally moving to Japan. He joined Mercari/Merpay in December of 2021, and now manages engineering teams in the Growth domain. Engineering Manager Sumil joined Merpay in Feb 2023 and works as an EM (engineering manager) on the Growth Platform Team. Prior to joining Merpay, he worked for Amazon as a technical program manager and a software development manager (SDM). He built customer experience solutions for fashion category, supply chain management solutions and last mile solutions. In addition, he worked for Cisco as a senior engineering manager where he built broadcast and video on demand catalogue management solutions for TV. Engineering Manager Sumil Panicker

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For starters - Recap ● Center of Excellence in India ○ Established in 2022 June ● Many unknows ○ Who will be involved? ○ How will it work? ○ What kind of issues? ○ … ● Go Bold and beyond!

Who will be involved? ● Many people! ○ Engineering, Corporate, … ○ Backend, iOS, Android, … ● Marketplace ○ Core, TnS, … ● Fintech - Merpay/Mercoin ○ Growth Platform, …

Growth Platform ● Growth Platform is responsible for the tools and services that other Growth teams use to implement group-wide campaigns, including: ○ customer communications: banners, landing pages, notifications, etc ○ deliver coupons and points

Defining Moments ● 2022 October: Japan visits, onboarding team members ● 2023 January: New squads with dedicated Scrum Master ● 2023 February: Sumil joins / Mercari 10th Anniversary ● 2023 March: India team visits Japan for the 1st time ● 2023 April: Golden Week, autonomy ● 2023 June: Other teams from Japan visit India

Challenges ● Process ambiguity ● Culture ● Language ● Availability ● Expectations ● Hiring

Process ambiguity ● Using Scrum as it was a familiar process to everyone ○ Daily Syncs ○ Backlog Grooming ○ Sprint Review ○ Retrospective ○ Planning ● Everyone writes ○ Shared Documentation, from simple meeting minutes to Design Docs and Confluence pages are especially important in a distributed environment ○ Writing is used to ensure communications are clear among all the team members

Culture: Differences are our strength ● We foster diverse thinking. We learn from each other. ● Team members respect and value each other’s opinions ● There are technically oriented arguments. The team reach consensus through discussion ● Team members find it fun learning new words, understanding cultures and also seeing the sameness in people no matter where they come from

Language: Overcoming Barriers ● Global Operations Team (GOT) - for meetings ● DeepL - for translating documents ● We also have some members who know Japanese and English - they do translation

● JST is 3.5 hours + IST Time ○ Considering an average of 8 hours of work time. This means the team is available 11.5 hours every day ○ Overlap of 6 hours. This is a good time for collaborating ● Public/National Holidays ○ There is always someone working. No interruption in business ○ E.g. golden week ● Ensure "just enough" access to systems ○ Provides tools for ensuring access is granted on a per-need basis ○ Regardless of accessing from Japan or India Availability

Expectations ● Committee ○ Site leader, CTO, VPs, managers all on the same page ○ Regular sync ● Expectations document ○ Aligned ○ Written and clear

Hiring ● Sequence of hiring ○ Hiring individual contributors was faster than managers ○ Some engineers were hired before the Engineering Manager (EM) was available ● Team topology ○ Platform of platform ○ Inverse Conway maneuver

Team Building: Fun!

Future ● Growth Platform ○ Optimize monitoring and incident handling ○ Consolidate services while ensuring Growth ● Merpay & Mercoin ○ Fintech in Japan ● Japan Region ○ Aligning OKRs across different business verticals

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