Trainline's developers will continue to mix blue skies and clouds in 2018, says CTO Holt

The company's culture of fostering innovation is responsible for its recent voice app

Mark Holt, CTO of rail ticket vendor Trainline, happily acknowledges that the industry is changing. Paper's days are numbered; just as aviation has done, rail is shifting to embrace e-tickets and other innovations.

"The industry is moving online; everything's moving online. Actually, everything's moving on mobile," Holt told us recently.

The company launched a voice-activated app last year, which uses machine learning to give regular travellers information about their journey and help them to buy tickets. Holt said, "It started out as a Skunkworks project. It was just a bunch of devs and one of them went ‘Google Voice? That sounds like a good idea, let's have a crack at that!'

"Then they came in and went ‘Look what we've done!' I love that… We brought them all a Google Home and told them to enhance it and play with it, and they continue to do a lot of it in their spare time."

Trainline's developers built the voice app largely in their spare time, as a passion project. Having time for blue-sky thinking like this is very important, Holt says, but he's also aware that "Developer time is a finite resource… Making sure that it's allocated to the highest-returning activities is something that we're quite obsessed with."

That is why the majority of developer time at Trainline is spent on growing the business. Even during the company's migration to AWS, only about 30 per cent of resources were spent on that project, and the rest on growing the top line.

"The average at an organisation might be 50, 60, 70 per cent [of developer time] is spent just keeping the lights on. If you look at our dev time over the last year, it's about ten per cent. Ninety per cent was allocatable to growth initiatives, driving or improving the business."

Trainline is set to continue its investments in new tools and innovation over the next 12 months. Holt said, "We'll continue to invest in technology and infrastructure that improves the user experience. We have a lot of really cool predictive capabilities running in our labs, and these should see the light of day [in 2018]... We'll also continue to innovate our Google Assistant voice app, as well as looking at other chatbot opportunities."

The user experience would fail without a solid back-end to support it. Holt says, "We'll double or triple down on AWS, complete the migration of our ERP system to Dynamics 365 and work with the teams to further reduce our cloud infrastructure costs."

It sounds like a good - and busy - time to be a Trainline dev.