Architecture and Mediation at StubHub

Achievements  

• Increased team effectiveness by brokering collaboration across the StubHub engineering organization, and championing autonomy and a DEVOPS culture.
• Advanced the modernization effort and cloud replatforming by coordinating contractors and internal teams, promoting continuous learning and introducing new relevant technologies.

Story  

StubHub is a secondary market event ticketing platform offering individuals the ability to re-sell their unused tickets but also allowing large venues and organizations to manage their inventory risk.

This 1500-person company had embarked into a large modernization initiative with the goals to move away from their own data center and to the Google Cloud Platform and standardize their services under a unified platform. A massive endeavor to port a highly tuned infrastructure and their 250-person engineering team to the cloud. A very siloed organizational structure made it even more challenging.

Through diplomacy and relationship building, I was able to align stakeholders, bridge gaps between teams and improve trust. This created more engagement with the initiative and unblocked teams.

On the technology side, we explored the relevant capabilities of GCP, from databases to service orchestration as well as introducing an event driven architecture built on Confluent’s offering of Kafka. The overarching goal being to support team productivity and support the scale of StubHub’s activities.

Alignment proved key. It was great to witness more collaboration across teams. Everyone pushing in the same direction instead of against each other.