Thou shalt become developers - from Ops to Dev at Wayfair

At Wayfair, we sell furniture and home goods online, all around the world. We’re a technology-first business, and one of the main ways we use supplier data is with Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Through EDI, we exchange purchase orders, inventory, invoices, and many other documents with suppliers, carriers, and other partners across the business.

For years, we’ve had an EDI operations team customizing an EDI COTS platform. We’re now replacing it with a microservices-based document translation system in the cloud, which means turning our EDI operations team into a cross-functional delivery team practicing You Build It You Run It.

We’d like to share our approach to cross-skilling our operations engineers into developer roles while tackling cultural challenges and misconceptions, and learning from our mistakes as we go. We’re putting our people first, so we can take control of our own destiny in terms of throughput, reliability, and quality for document exchange within and, outside of, Wayfair.