Full steam ahead for new Trainline CTO Milena Nikolic
Despite slowing train travel, Trainline’s tech team has worked hard to maintain momentum in the last two years.
Public transport took a big hit in the pandemic, with train travel falling to just 22% of pre-Covid levels in 2020. But with that crisis now largely in the rear mirror, digital ticketing platform Trainline is accelerating again.
"We're now seeing very, very good recovery and people coming back to trains," says new CTO Milena Nikolic, who joined the company last year.
"This is such an amazing opportunity and everything we're seeing is super encouraging in that sense. Throughout this period the market is recovering but also people are changing their habits [towards work], and it's for the better for everyone: better for the rail industry and our train operating company partners, better for us, and ultimately better for the planet."
Despite the two-year slowdown in train use, Trainline never lost momentum, even as its traffic became much more bursty - spiking up and down as regulations changed. Even in the worst of the pandemic, the company retained its sizeable tech team of more than 400 people across different specialisations
Now that train use is consistently climbing again, the company's new products developed in the last two years, like sTickets, are being stress tested at an ever-increasing scale.
"For us as a tech team it was really interesting. It took some work to make sure that at any given point in time were well provisioned and capable to take on that scale and growth, especially in the morning peak hours when many people are buying their train tickets. We're now in a really good place to be able to handle both the current scale and growth over the next year."
That doesn't mean Trainline made no tech team changes over the last two years. When Nikolic joined, she worked with fellow new hire Mike Hyde - Trainline's chief data officer - to reconsider how the technical organisation worked, and to ensure the company's technical investments were aligned with its wider business strategy.
"I genuinely see software development as a team sport, and unless you make the team more than the sum of its parts and really make sure that it works as a team - not just a collection of individual engineers - you're never going to get the most out of the investment that you're putting into the people.
"I think the biggest [change we made] was the Target Operating Model. So effectively, we've changed ways of working within technology to structure our teams around the concept of horizontals and verticals, where horizontal is the platform teams who own our technology stack, and they work to enable different verticals - the core kind of working verticals, of working end-to-end to move specific business metrics, or to deliver aspects of customer experience that are very end-to-end.
"I'm a big believer in a model like this, I think it creates empowered, dynamic teams that really understand their mission. They understand what they're trying to do for the business and they're empowered to contribute end-to-end with very minimal churn and process, to be able to really drive the outcomes."
So far teams have reported great results, praising their new empowerment. As a side benefit, Nikolic says having a strong platform team also made it possible to focus on the core technical functional and non-functional requirements related to scale, latency, engineering, productivity and system robustness.
To further motivate team members, Trainline has adopted a "flexi-first" approach to work. As should come as no surprise in 2022, this is a hybrid approach where people can set their own office days.
"Different companies have chosen different models and it wasn't trivial to figure out what was the right thing to do - we experimented a little bit just to make sure we chose the right thing going forward... We don't ask people to come in for a specific number of days or anything like that. We leave it to the individual teams and managers to work out whatever is the right office schedule. We do have people in teams that come in three or five days a week; equally, we have people in teams that come in less and that will depend on how well the team is formed."
While Nikolic "loves" the Trainline offices in Holborn and admits that it's hard to replicate the level of collaboration available face-to-face, she says the entire executive team was "very impressed" with how well the company and its employees performed throughout Covid.
"They have adjusted to it really well; they have found ways to stay very effective and collaborate. We just wanted to keep that flexibility while also benefiting from the real-life contact in the in the office; that's why it's flexi-first."
The UK's rail system might be returning to normal slowly, but Trainline's technical side has refused to stand still in the last two years. The infrastructure runs entirely on AWS and is heavy on microservices, and Nikolic says her teams nearly have to run just to keep up with the pace of change in tech.
That hasn't deterred anyone. In fact, Trainline is investigating infrastructure-as-code, as well as new uses for AI and machine learning, to continue building robust, scalable systems. Considering their past successes, the tech team has a green light to keep moving - and shows no signs of slowing down.