Put open source to work
July 16–17, 2018: Training & Tutorials
July 18–19, 2018: Conference
Portland, OR

Working groups at Wayfair

Adam Baratz (Wayfair)
2:50pm3:05pm Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Location: E141
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 1 rating)

Wayfair’s engineering team has more than 1,300 engineers. Its many small sprint teams work efficiently and effectively on their own, but as the company has grown, engineering has experienced challenges in collaborating across the department. To address this, Wayfair introduced a concept called working groups, based on InnerSource principles, that lets the engineering team run these kinds of projects with the efficiency expected from any other team. Adam Baratz offers an overview of how Wayfair structures its working groups, details their pros and cons, and explains how the company plans to iterate on this pattern. Adam then shares examples of projects Wayfair has tackled with working groups.

Photo of Adam Baratz

Adam Baratz

Wayfair

Adam Baratz is a director of engineering at Wayfair, where he leads the Boston-based teams that build the upper-funnel customer experience and the storefront teams in Wayfair’s Berlin office. He also participates in architecture reviews for department-wide projects. Adam incorporated InnerSource concepts into these processes to create more effective working groups that are capable of influencing engineering practices across a 1,300-person department.