Kogan.com

“For a technology company we have a relatively tight and efficient engineering team, yet we’re able to deliver features to our customers that a lot of bigger companies cannot,” Chief Technology Officer Goran Stefkovski had said during his keynote address at AWS Summit 2016.

“We take a pragmatic approach to software delivery, delivering valuable pieces in vertical slices to our customers. Each step is valuable and focused, and AWS is one of those steps.”

Stefkovski found his team spending far too much time and effort scaling its cloud and infrastructure services.  He wanted to see his development team focus more on customer-facing features, such as improving the algorithms that suggest new products to customers.

“Our developers were familiar with it as one of those products that people just start to play with at home or at work, and it’s something we’d already started using for some services.  Secondly we have a strong technical alignment between the AWS services and our technology stack.”

“A lot of people like to talk cost savings from cloud but I like to talk about how our customers experience those savings,” Stefkovski said. “We gave our customers a faster, more resilient online experience, and we enabled our developers to build new features for customers more quickly and with even higher quality assurance standards.”

In the mid-term, that means a strong focus on artificial intelligence and algorithmic prediction engines. “This is important because we now have nearly 30,000 products and we don’t expect our customers to scroll through each one of them to find something they like,” Stefkovski said.

“A long time ago we realised that it was important for customers spending time on our site to see products that are relevant to them so they feel like Kogan’s a personal experience for their needs. By looking at customer behaviours and running them through a number of different algorithms, we give results based on what we think that person is into or based on an action.”

“It’s not just about showing the right message to the right customer at the right time.  It’s also showing it to them at the right price and in the right manner.”

He said Kogan would continue to align with technology partners like AWS that are disruptive, care about their customers and are always moving forward, not afraid to innovate and build something new.