Tech stacks and weight racks: Why The Gym Group won’t be defined by tech debt
'If we can out-innovate everyone else in the industry through technology, I've done my job well’
Fitness is a simple proposition: pick heavy stuff up, put it down again, get stronger. But just like tech debt, there’s more to it when you dig deeper.
“We carry a degree of tech debt, as any business does,” says The Gym Group CTO Milan Juza; debt that has grown from a combination of tech stack modernisation – essential to keep the low-cost 24/7 model running – and acquisitions.
The company moved to a fully cloud native model running in Azure in 2018 – just one year after it took over most of easyGym’s physical estate.
“The frontend is typically written in React, the backend is .NET, and we run everything as microservices leveraging Kubernetes clusters and a multi-AZ setup from an infrastructure point of view,” says Milan.
Third party services relieve some pressure: tools like Workday and Salesforce help run member management, payments and access management. Just as importantly, they help The Gym Group grow – one of Milan’s key goals.
“From a strategy point of view, one of the key areas of focus for us is effectively continuing to grow our ability to deliver value at pace. For me, that's a big thing; if we can out-innovate and out-compete everyone else in the industry through technology, I've done my job well.”
Carrying weight
Constantly pushing higher, further and faster is all very well, but in the gym that can lead to a serious injury; and in IT, it can leave you with excess baggage in the form of tech debt. Either way, a period of consolidation and healing is required.
Milan and his team are now focusing on an internal tool, The Gym Group’s core API application, which integrates all those important third-party services into the frontend.
Currently a monolith, the tech team is decomposing the API app into a set of microservices. Encouragingly, this is happening well before anything breaks.
The application is doing its job “perfectly well,” says Milan; “but when I talked about increasing pace, increasing agility and enabling us to really deliver each value stream independently, I need those services to be deployable independently from each other.”
This ‘fixing what isn’t broken’ approach carries through to third party platforms like member management and payments, where The Gym Group is “actively looking into the next generation” - meaning SaaS models.
Milan admits the company could carry on with the current setup for the next few years and it will “probably be okay,” but he wants to head off any trouble long before it starts.
“In my career, I've too often been in this situation where we ended up with a burning platform... I want us to be on the front foot, I want us to make these changes on our terms and not because our hand was forced.”
He adds, “There is quite an ambitious growth plan [at The Gym Group], and as a CTO I don't want to be the one who's holding the business back. I want to be the one who's actually powering the growth itself.”
All change
As a tech leader, powering growth means enabling a blistering pace of innovation, change and delivery. But what does that look like as a tech leader in a fitness chain?
Unsurprisingly, it all comes back to the members: making sure they are well served, in control and likely to carry on with their membership.
“The direction of travel is greater sophistication and control in this product space, so we can enable people to more freely choose the right membership product for their specific needs.”
Data analytics will continue to be key for The Gym Group to optimise its pricing strategy – at both the per-gym and even per-product level – and as already mentioned, the chain plans to replace some third party tools over the next two years.
“That will enable us to introduce completely new capabilities to the market that currently would require just excessive amount of in-house development, which would not be justified.”
But what about the physical tech in the gyms themselves? With the IoT “incomparably richer” than it was just five years ag, Milan is seeking to install a range of new sensors across the retail estate. That could include computer vision in public areas, heat and humidity tracking, and even sensors that can detect antisocial behaviour through language analysis.
“We are very actively looking into how we can leverage [sensor technologies] in making that experience either safer or better overall for members, or generate more insights for the business to make better choices.”
The end goal is for technology to permeate throughout the business, augmenting traditional gym roles. For example, a manager who can use technology to understand who is in the gym and engage with them, without needing to get to know every individual personally.
“For me the Nirvana would be, in this low-cost model, that the technology is there to support every single bit of the operation and humans are the cherry on the top that makes it really, really slick and super and human centric.
“That's the transition we are on, but I see a huge potential in this space; and I’m hoping that over the next couple of years, we will get closer and closer to it.”
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