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JOSE UGIA: Hello.
Be welcome to our very first chat about payments
specially baked for developers.
My name is Jose and I'm a developer relations engineer
at Google Pay.
Today with us, we have Eric Brooke
who is the vice president of engineering at SpotHero.
Hello, Eric.
And thank you so much for joining us today.
ERIC BROOKE: Hey, Jose.
Thank you for having me today.
JOSE UGIA: I think a great way to start
would be to learn a bit more about SpotHero and what you do.
So could you tell us in your own words what SpotHero is about,
and what your vision towards urban mobility and sustainable
transportation?
ERIC BROOKE: So our goal is to make parking easier.
In fact, just making it easier for
customers to get everywhere.
And that's really what we focus on,
is making sure that you can park easily regardless of your trip,
whether it be getting a monthly, or like going to an event,
or going on a shopping trip.
That's our goal.
Make it easier.
JOSE UGIA: So moving a bit more towards the technical domain,
what would you say at a high level
is the tech stack that you are using at SpotHero?
ERIC BROOKE: Yeah.
So our journey started on a Python Django Monolith.
And bit by bit, we've grown beyond that.
So for an example, we need search
to be really performant and fast.
And so we moved it to Golang to really improve its performance
and responsiveness.
Like many people, we have multiple stacks.
So you have an Android stack, you have an iOS stack,
and you have a data science stack.
I'm not going to go cover all of them.
But Android, obviously we're using Kotlin, XML,
and it's something that we're very proud of as one
of our channels for customers.
JOSE UGIA: That is a pretty diverse set of technologies.
Also pretty modern as well.
And it's great to see a good amount of open sourcing
there as well.
I would be interested to hear more about the model pipeline
that you have.
Concretely, what purpose are you giving
to those statistical or mathematical models,
especially if there's any of those
which is payments related?
ERIC BROOKE: One of them is dynamic pricing.
So a lot of people, when they think of car parking,
they think of like, oh there's a wall, has a list of prices,
or a list of rates as we call them, and that's kind of it.
In actual fact, it's very, very complex.
Most garages have about 100 different rates.
And to coordinate that manually is incredible amount of work.
So one of the things we're doing working with operators, those
that own car parks and manage them,
is to make a system more dynamic, something
we're kind of used to from the airline industry
or even hotels.
So dynamic pricing is very important to us.
And we released it about a year ago.
And we're working with key operators
to really make this smart.
JOSE UGIA: When it comes to building a product
like SpotHero, what were some key technical challenges
that you faced during that process?
ERIC BROOKE: The industry itself was very cash based.
So that was probably one of our biggest challenges
is helping the industry move to more of a digital payments
perspective.
But broadly, some of the most complex areas, the number one
were probably integrations.
We work with about 35 different companies
that have different hardware and different software.
And these parks companies are the ones
that build the gates, the ticket machines, and all
the other varieties.
And of course, they all work in very different ways.
So integrations with the park's equipment
is actually probably the number one.
Number two I mentioned a little bit earlier
is search, is being performant on search,
giving people the right information,
is probably kind of our second challenge.
And then the third challenge is it is technical,
but it's something that startups often see.
And that is shared understanding about what work we're doing.
When you start with a monolith, you often
end up with multiple layers of different types of work.
So one of the things that we're focused on very much now
is using something like domain driven design
to really understand and break up the work that we have to do.
This makes it easier for product.
It makes it easier for engineers.
And then they don't kind of think,
I have to look at 64 different things
to understand what the side effects are.
So domain driven design is something
that we're definitely investing at the moment.
JOSE UGIA: I think that in a world where mobile phones are
carrying so many utilities that we use on a daily basis,
it feels that payments could be an important piece
of that puzzle.
ERIC BROOKE: They're essential.
Without them, we don't really have a business
because we don't really work in cash.
We work in digital payments.
So understanding how digital payments work, how are they
trusted by consumers, which ones do consumers prefer to use,
are really important to have as part of our understanding.
Google and other companies have made this much, much easier
with things like Google Pay, which are actually
fairly easy to hook up with.
JOSE UGIA: And how are you playing
with the fragmentation of the multiple options
that you have today?
If you go to some services, some websites or applications,
I think for a good reason today, there
is a sizable amount of options, which
is hard to handle sometimes for the user.
Because you may have six or seven of those.
How are you dealing with that, and maybe thinking
about choosing the two or three top
best options for payments for any given customer?
ERIC BROOKE: Yeah, you're right.
It's very important to choose the right ones
and make sure the customer has the right choices
because we want that to be simple for the customer.
We also want to be following the trends in terms of which ones
they already invested in as customers.
So we pay attention to how--
I'm sorry, customers move through the market.
What do they trust?
And what do they prefer to pay with?
The other thought process is how easy are the SEKs to work with?
From an engineering perspective, that's really important.
Because we don't want to reinvent the wheel.
We want to be able to hook this in, make it really simple,
be able to trust it, and audit it when necessary.
JOSE UGIA: And precisely in that regard,
what was your experience integrating Google Pay
in your Android application?
ERIC BROOKE: Really simple, actually.
So I thought it was one line of code.
But I checked and it's actually five lines of code.
Basically--
JOSE UGIA: Not too bad.
ERIC BROOKE: Yeah.
We're pulling together the Stripe params.
Because we use Stripe as our payment processor for SpotHero.
And then we're passing that information directly
to the Google SDK.
It actually getting up and running was really simple.
The thing that we probably took a little bit more time
was testing it and believing it was this simple.
So testing and staging was something
that we took a little time to figure out.
But it was well worth the investment.
JOSE UGIA: You said that making payments work in preproduction
environments was less straightforward.
What advice would you have for other developers maybe facing
similar challenges?
ERIC BROOKE: I think that one of the beautiful things
about technology sector at the moment
is that everybody shares what they learn.
So there's a lot of blogs out there.
A couple of things to really think about,
though, is making sure you have good testing
around your payment system.
If you can make it automated, that's great.
Saves engineers time.
It saves test engineers time as well.
The other things you need to think about
is when you do test it in production,
making sure you have a credit card that you can use
for that purpose, and always having a test account
that you can do for that purpose.
Payments is important.
And also keeping our customers, our drivers, safe
is really important to us.
So test it, understand it, make sure
that you're not setting up your customers for failure.
JOSE UGIA: I like the [INAUDIBLE] testing,
I think it's not set enough that it actually saves time
no matter how it looks like at the beginning.
I've heard that you integrated Google Pay a while back.
So I'm sure that you were able to collect
a good amount of information, metrics, insights
about how it really did and how it developed.
Do you have some more quantitative information
on how that played out?
And I think if we could talk about both new users
and existing users, I think that will be a great perspective
to bring.
ERIC BROOKE: Yeah.
So we introduced it in October 2017.
And as I said, it was a fairly simple process.
And we actually worked with Google
to figure out a promotion to get people
to see how that would work.
So we motivated them for a promotion.
Where we are now is about 33% of all our Android
users use Google Pay today.
And we see that trend going up as more and more people
trust kind of like their wallets and their finances
to mobile phones.
JOSE UGIA: That's great to hear actually.
Now looking into the future, how would you
like to see the digital payments ecosystem adapt and evolved
to this fast changing surroundings and environment
that we face today?
ERIC BROOKE: Yeah.
I think from a business perspective,
one of the things we really appreciate
is being able to audit payments in an easy fashion.
One of the pieces of work that comes up later,
not when you're starting out in a small startup,
but when you get to kind of hundreds of thousands
and millions of kind of transactions,
you've also got to think about PCI compliance.
So how you use protecting credit card information even if you're
not necessarily using it, who are you passing it off to,
who's doing that work.
So being able to audit it is something
that's really, really helpful for businesses if they grow.
And also saves us doing the work, another good thing
that's really helpful in that.
In terms of going forward, we all
have to work on building trust and making sure
that all of the payment systems are fully
transparent to the customer and that they understand
what any extra fees are about.
So the more transparent we are, the more people will trust us.
And we have to do that not just as payment processors
as a company, but also like companies like SpotHero, doing
right by the customers.
JOSE UGIA: Now we believe that there
is great knowledge behind each project, each team working
on real applications, real services, real products.
So we like to ask you about a well kept secret, or a tip,
or a recipe that you use and practice
at SpotHero that you think every developer should know about.
ERIC BROOKE: Yeah.
I think a lot of tech companies are very similar because we
learn and share from each other, whether you hear transparency,
autonomy, making sure we have blamers retros, making
sure you have the opportunity to work
with cutting edge technology.
A lot of us do that.
I think from a SpotHero perspective,
one of the things we deeply care about
is we don't view you as a resource, or a cog in a wheel,
or a hamster in a ball.
We view you as a human.
And so when we think about our decision making about where
people move, what is their career growth,
we're not just thinking about your ability
to write code, or even your ability
to collaborate as an engineer.
We're thinking about you.
What are you like when you go home?
How are you surviving the environment, whatever that be?
So thinking about the wider perspective of this human
we really care about.
And I think that's something that as a tech industry,
we should pay a lot of attention to.
JOSE UGIA: Yeah.
I was about to comment on that.
But I think you said it best.
So I think the one thing that I could say
is, thank you so much for sharing
that bit of time and your knowledge
with us and with our viewers.
And I really wish you all the best
for any existing and new adventures ahead.
So thank you.
Thank you, Eric, for being with us.
ERIC BROOKE: Yeah.
It was great to be here today, Jose.
JOSE UGIA: And that was Eric Brooke from SpotHero.
Thank you to you all for watching.
And I'll see you next time.
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