Gumtree Group emerges from 18-month IT rebuild

Gumtree Group is emerging from a major 18-month program of work that saw it transform whole processes and stand up new core business systems following its sale in 2022.

Group CTO and project sponsor Paul Russell told the iTnews Podcast that the classifieds business - home to Gumtree Australia, CarsGuide and Autotrader - had been sold twice in as many years, first by eBay in 2021 and then Adevinta in 2022.

Russell joined as Adevinta was shopping the group to prospective purchasers. 

“For someone who was really quite new, it was interesting,” Russell said. “I had a really rapid onboarding and then had to go and explain a business that I had only just joined.”

The bigger challenge for Russell and his team came after a buyer emerged, and a deadline was placed on system separation.

“We were ‘the Australian office’ of a global tech company, and as you would imagine they’d centralised everything that they could,” Russell said.

“We were lucky enough that we had control of our own products in Australia - CarsGuide, Autotrader and Gumtree, but we didn't have any of the back-office systems, [or] a handful of product-based features as well, like the Gumtree messaging system.

“All of those were owned and operated by our former owner, and we had 18 months to get out of every single one of them.”

Russell characterises the underlying complexity of the 18-month hard break from Adevinta’s systems as “craziness” from a workload perspective.

“A sensible person would chew off two or three of those in that sort of period. [We had] about seven major systems, another dozen smaller systems, and probably over 50 different contracts for tools and services that we were provided by our former owner,” Russell said.

“I had a good, hard think about how we were going to achieve that because it was a really big undertaking.

“People joke about changing the engines of the plane while it's still flying. But these were the systems that ran our business, and if we couldn’t send out bills or pay people, then we’d be in a fair bit of hot water.”

Principles for system selection

An early challenge was that Gumtree Group used platforms and processes provided by its European parent that it did not understand the inner workings of.

“We were in a fairly strange and difficult situation in that we didn't actually understand how a lot of our back-office processes worked for our company, because they were provided by a centralised team somewhere in Europe,” Russell said.

“We were a very small market in a global business, and so they couldn't exactly tell us - or we couldn't definitively find out - how some of these things worked.

“Rather than try to take the lid off that can of worms, understand all that enormous amount of detail, and weed out what's in their processes because they're a big global company versus what we need, we started from first principles. We just need to run expenses or approve them and so on. It was simpler, and faster.”

Russell outlined a series of principles that were used to inform the group’s back-office technology choices in support of the new processes.

The first of these was to select “right-sized” systems matched to an Australian operation of its scale.

“We were leaving a big global corporate, which used SAP for finance, but that is not appropriate for a 200-person company like us.”

The group elected to re-platform to a “good mid-tier” option in the form of Certinia, which used to be known as FinancialForce.

“We got to choose a good system rather than having to be stuck in some old system for some legacy reason we didn't have that anymore,” Russell said.

The second principle was to standardise everything, eschewing adaptations and customisations.

“We used the system in the way that it was designed to be used rather than trying to change the system to fit the way that we thought it should be used,” Russell said.

“People's first inclination is often to go and customise things as much as they can. But we were designing everything from scratch, and when we designed all of our processes, we did so with the systems in mind to use them the way they're meant to be used.”

The third principle was to choose systems that already “worked together” to minimise system integration; in this case, selecting a stack aligned to the Salesforce ecosystem.

Other principles included choosing only best-of-breed as-a-service applications (or managed services where appropriate), and baking in security from the outset.

“We didn't deploy a single server in the rollout of all these systems,” Russell said.

“We're not in the business of operating that sort of infrastructure. We're in the business of running our products and things that are unique to us, so I didn't want to have a team of people running finance systems and HR systems. It's a distraction from what is the core of our business.”

Pragmatism was another feature of the transition.

In total, Gumtree Group stood up seven major systems or instances for finance, CRM, billing, data warehousing, HR, payroll system and recruitment. Not all systems are completely new or unfamiliar, however.

The group elected to stick with Salesforce for its CRM, albeit on its own instance.

“We were so deep in Salesforce, we could only do so much change at once. It's a new implementation of Salesforce, but at least people didn't have to learn [a new CRM],” Russell said.

“Same for expenses - we use [SAP] Concur. It’s not particularly expensive, and everyone already knows how to use it. We just have our own instance now.”

The short timeframe called for pragmatic technology decision-making, Russell noted, and the principles were central to the right decisions being made.

“Following those principles really tightly is the only reason we got to the end in time,” he said.

‘Exiting whole processes’

Rather than move off one system and onto another, Russell designed the transition program to be centred around processes instead.

“One of the big things I think we did was we exited whole processes rather than individual systems,” he said.

“For example, if you think about the process of finance and billing and so on, if we replaced just one of those systems, we'd have had to unhook that component from our previous owner’s systems, hook in our new one and then pipe the output back into one of their systems. That's a lot of work.

“So, we replaced finance, CRM and billing all in one go. That whole process changed all at once, and so we just had to cut it off. We stopped using the old system, migrated the data, and started using the whole new process.

“We also did both the HR and the payroll systems together, rather than having to get our new HR system talking to their payroll system and then replace the payroll system [later].

“Again, a lot of these were fairly pragmatic things to do because we just didn't have that much time.”

Baking in security

The all software-as-a-service model and mostly Salesforce stack provided benefits from a security perspective.

By selecting systems that integrated with Salesforce, the group was able to apply the same base security model across a number of core systems.

Starting from scratch with new systems, and choosing cloud-based ones, also meant that security was baked into the system design and configuration from the beginning.

“The great thing about starting from scratch is that we can put in place the right security at the start,” Russell said.

“We built a governance model to understand how we wanted to run these things, worked out who the right people were and what the right [role-based and system] permissions were, and applied them.”

A renewed focus on product

While Russell’s role as CTO has always been primarily about developing and enhancing Gumtree Group’s products, the past two years “has been a fairly big sideline” and distraction to that effort and focus.

With the back-office work now completed, there is time to invest back into the products.

“Gumtree as a product, for example, has been well maintained, but hasn't really been moving forward at the speed which it needs to,” Russell said.

“We've got a couple of really big projects that we're focusing on now.

“One is redesigning the front end just to make it much more usable for buyers and sellers, and the other is that we're looking at introducing payments … [so] you can use Gumtree as a secure payment mechanism to buy and to ship goods between places.

“Gumtree has always been a locally based product up to now, but if you can do payments and shipping, then suddenly the whole of Australia is open for people to buy and sell goods.

That could be a really big game-changer for us, but we couldn't really focus on that before because we were distracted with all of those migration projects.

“Now that we have the capacity, we’re really doubling down on some of those big projects.”