The specialists behind special offers

 

Meet Péter. He’s a Software Development Manager, leading a team of specialists who manage meal deals, discount dumplings and keep the trolley wheels turning behind the scenes.

 

“My role at Tesco involves lots of communication. From coordinating projects and managing meetings, to working with leadership teams and engineers, every day is about bringing people together to keep the whole Tesco ecosystem going.

Before that, I was in an engineering role where I was developing code, and slowly started transforming into more of a manager than an engineer. That caused quite a lot of confusion! When you have to do both jobs full-time, that's really not something that's going to fly.

But here at Tesco, these are clearly separate roles. When I started, I wanted to try out a purely managerial role, and they gave me that opportunity.

Why Tesco? Well, I never thought of Tesco as a technology company! It was actually my fiancé who told me about the job, and I thought ‘what does Tesco do with engineering managers?’ During the interview process, it turned out that there is a great technology team at Tesco. Almost everybody in my team has over 10 years of development experience and a great technology stack. That was a surprise for me! But now I work here at Tesco, doing technology.

My team is the promotion life cycle API. Basically, we fill in the gaps between the products and the people, the business, the engineers and the leadership. We're the glue in the whole organisation. Really, we’re the gatekeepers before any promotion or clearance goes live in store. That could involve anything apart from fresh reductions, including clothes, dry food and alcohol.

We operate based on the amount of product in stock in each store, or in the whole Tesco organisation. If someone had to check those manually one by one, that would be really time-consuming! Luckily, it's an easy task for a program to verify. Our system is a rule-check engine. That means you can throw something at it, and it will give you either a thumbs up saying, ‘yes, good to go,’ or it will throw back a hundred lines of error messages saying, ‘no, this is not good.’

Every country has its specific rules and regulations too, and we're the ones verifying all of them, to make sure nothing collides. It's a complicated job, let's put it that way! That’s why everyone in the organisation has to come to us to get a green stamp on their offer.

At Tesco, we always come up with something new to adapt to the changing market. We did have an old legacy system which was installed for each of the countries separately. But right now, we’re in the middle of moving this legacy system out and replacing it with a strategic solution that will serve all countries.

More complex, more personalised offers are going to come. We’re changing the mechanics, how it all works. We’re even changing what offers you can have. There's a lot on the roadmap, which I obviously can’t share in too much detail!

What I can say, is that Tesco is working hard to serve customers better every day.

This year, we survived Christmas without any tech incidents. The system was working. Everything went through in time; no delays, no hiccups, no nothing. We’re really pleased with how our systems performed over this period, especially as it’s the busiest time of the year for Tesco.

It wasn’t my own personal achievement. There were a lot of people working on it and a lot of effort went into it, to make sure the holiday was a success.

That’s what the culture is like at Tesco. We have lots of different people from all around the world - different countries, different time zones - all working together. We’re not afraid to ask the hard questions. And we’re not afraid to get hard answers, if needed! I think it's a really good environment.

Tesco isn’t just about technology for technologists - we definitely have an impact on what's happening in the wider organisation, and on the Tesco customers. It's much bigger than it looks from the outside.

To anyone thinking about joining the Technology team at Tesco, I would say heck yes! It's going to be busy but you're going to learn a lot. We work together and we expect all our people to be owning their decisions and products.

You can learn and progress. You can choose the technology and the architecture you’re working with. You can use whatever you want, as long as it’s accepted into the tech ecosystem.

We’re here to get things moving forward – and we’re here to do it together.” 

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