Rapid Growth and Big Impacts at Mercari as an Engineering Manager
Ryan Ginstrom describes his unexpected career turn towards being an engineering manager, and the unique freedoms he's found at Mercari.
Ryan Ginstrom, an engineering manager at Mercari, explained that it’s actually better to “fail big.”
People aren’t penalized for taking a bold initiative, or trying something that might fail and failing.
“Like doing something super simple and failing, that’s probably not great, right?” he said. “But if you try something really challenging and you don’t succeed, it’s like, ‘Ok, that was just another piece of data.’”
“It’s really important at Mercari,” he added, “to have a wide impact. And we say, like, at level X, you should have impact within your group. At Level Y, you should have impact across the company. That focus on impact, I think, is unique as far as I’ve seen.”
This company’s culture of risk-taking to make a difference helped inspire Ryan to change roles from Senior Engineer to Engineering Manager, which was not originally his intention when hired at Mercari. Initially, he simply wanted to continue his usual engineering work at an international company in Japan.
“I actually first came to Japan in 1995,” he explained. “I’ve been a software developer for a bit over 20 years. I went back to the United States in 2011, [and was there] until 2021.”
When asked about his return to Japan: “Why Japan? I love it. My wife is Japanese. We love living here.”
That didn’t mean Ryan wanted to work for just any Japanese company. “I knew from the start that I wanted a more international work culture. Having worked in Japan before, I didn’t want to work super long hours or have a seniority-based promotion system, those kinds of things that I don’t like too much myself. That narrows down the range right there. Mercari was one of the companies that had the things I was looking for.”
Ryan’s pleased to report that his years of experience have been treated favorably by Mercari, rather than vice versa. “No, maybe surprisingly, I never felt like my age was a consideration. Full disclosure, I’m over 50.”
Perhaps it’s not a surprise, though, given Mercari’s advanced diversity and inclusion policies. “Yeah, we take [diversity and inclusion] seriously,” Ryan confirmed.
We publish our gender ratio at least every year, and when hiring we do try to have a diverse workforce.
“I came to Mercari as a software engineer,” said Ryan. “I was a tech lead right away, but I’ve just been around for a long time! I came to Mercari with the goal of implementing machine learning in search.
“At the time, machine learning wasn’t used in search at all. I thought it was a huge opportunity, because there are a lot of ways that machine learning can help search.”
But after working at Mercari for three years, his personal goals shifted.
I felt the role of mentoring and developing other engineers was more satisfying to me. So about a year ago, I moved over into the EM role.
What’s interesting about Mercari, Ryan noted, is that they’re one of the few tech companies that devotes time to training managers. “First of all, they . . . ask managers to identify members of their team who would want to, or be good for, stepping up to the EM role. Then there is an onboarding process. There are some courses we take. We have some workshops for managers.”
“So it’s better than most,” Ryan added. “But it could be better.”
Certainly becoming an engineering manager has been an adjustment for him personally.
I think the first thing that you have to learn is, you’re not a coder anymore. When you’re a new engineering manager, you feel really tempted to jump in and write code, but you have to think about whether that’s the best use of your time.
But it isn’t just his own workload he has to manage. “Engineers in general promise way more than they should, right? ‘Of course, I can do all this stuff!’ Then a new manager has that same mindset, and they promise a lot of stuff, and their engineers can’t do it, so they’re like, ‘Oh, I guess I’ll have to do it.’ You have to take a couple steps back, and as a manager, agree to a scope that your team can actually handle.”
You’re spending a lot of time dealing with project managers and program managers and your boss, to get everybody on the same page. Then, hopefully, your engineers don’t kill themselves or each other, and they deliver, and everybody’s happy. That’s our job, right?
For those to whom this sounds daunting, Ryan notes that Mercari also has a promotional ladder for engineers, enabling them to rise high in the ranks—”I think other places might call them ‘principal engineers’“—without needing to move into management.
Ryan clearly works hard not to overburden his team.
I want to say that overtime is zero. I never would want my people to work overtime. I’m not giving you stuff that you would have to do overtime to accomplish. I want to make sure that your workload does not make you do overtime.
“The one exception is we have ‘on call’, so we have to monitor our systems in production. If you’re on call, you might have to work, or get called up at night, at two o’clock in the morning on Saturday. We do in the company have a system where you get compensated if you’re on call on a weekend for two days. Every two days or a weekend or holidays, if you’re on call, you get a day off.”
In general, Ryan told us, teams at Mercari enjoy enormous flexibility in selecting their workflow, teams, and even the programming language they use.
We have preferences, like Go and Python on the backend are pretty much accepted, but some people might choose Rust or Java. They have their own repos where they keep their code. At the same time, we want to have cross-team standards, and we want to have tools and libraries that everybody uses. So we try to strike a balance.
“We have bots that trawl through people’s code, and say ‘Hey, you’re not using this library, or this thing is not accepted at Mercari.” According to Ryan, the bots help keep different teams within necessary guidelines, without impinging on their preferred workflow and style. In general, the system works well.
Mercari also actively seeks to improve their other systems and processes. Ryan told us that “Documentation tends to rot a bit, it gets out of date and nobody goes and fixes it. Actually, our CEO was pretty heated up about this. I guess he must have tried to find something and failed. But he created a team to fix that problem.”
In addition, Ryan’s own team aims to address the age-old problem of multiple teams independently developing the same feature. “Feature teams, they’re not incentivised to share their stuff, right? They want to deliver features, and making it available to other teams is like a secondary consideration for them. So one of our team’s missions is to make things available to others.”
When it comes to team flexibility, Ryan said, “We have this system called Bold Choice . . . you’re never stuck in one place”. Bold Choice allows employees to apply and be considered for open positions on other teams, with their manager being informed only if the application is successful.
Mercari says the system is intended to “provide each of our members with fair and open opportunities to change job positions without relying on connections or access to information. The goal is to create avenues for members to contemplate new challenges and growth opportunities on their own.”
The ease of intracompany transfers means that usually, engineering managers prefer to “hire” from within the company rather than outside of it. “It’s a lot easier because that person already passed all the interviews,” Ryan explained. “We know that they can work at Mercari. So it’s quick, right? Otherwise, we have to go through all these interview rounds and some will fail the coding test or whatever. It’s a longer process.
“And [this person is] a known quantity; we know that they’re not a jerk. So it’s a lot easier if somebody from inside the company wants to move over. But then, we don’t want to hurt other teams too much, so we try to balance it out. But if somebody wants to come, we definitely are happy to help them.”
Ryan’s team is actually looking for new members right now. “We’re a company-level AI team. Of course we use a lot of LLMs, generative AI, and traditional ML as well.”
“We released a couple new features just last month, actually,” he said. “The first one is called AI Listing. With this feature, somebody who’s going to list a product to be sold will take one or more photos of their item. [Then they’ll] select a category—we’ll suggest a couple—and then we’ll generate the entire listing from there, [including] the title and the description. That’s using LLM.
“The other main feature that we did was something called image embedding, and this is basically extracting semantic information out of images. You can imagine Mercari has a lot of images, right, and generally right now we only look at text when we’re judging listings. If you take a photo of a shirt and you say shirt in your description, we don’t know anything else about it.
“But if we actually looked at that shirt, we can say, ‘Oh, it’s green, it’s short sleeved,’ right? Even if you hadn’t written those words. So, it was really important for us to be able to get this information out of the images. We took an off-the-shelf model and we improved it for e-commerce, so it looks better with our catalog. We did a test with it using recommendations, and it worked quite well. So now we’re using this in other parts of our company where image information is important.”
That mission, as well as the features Ryan’s team is developing,are impactful enough that Mercari has decided to expand the team. “We have, right now, seven engineers on the team, and we’re planning to grow quite a bit actually, about double the number of engineers,” he said. “Of the engineers we have, everybody now is backend.”
We’re going to get a data person, some more machine learning engineers, and a frontend or full stack person because we’re creating a lot of prototypes. We want to be able to create good prototypes to sell these features.
Given how rapidly AI is altering the industry, this is likely only the beginning for Ryan’s team. He gave an example of how fast things are changing: “I told you we’re doing this semantic information from images, and we have a lot of uses for it. We actually tried this three years ago, and we got pretty far.
“Then we’re like, it’s going to cost too much. We started looking at the actual numbers, and as we’re developing this thing, we’re like, ‘This costs way too much. It’s going to cost us millions of dollars. And there’s no profit that’s going to offset that.’ So, we put it on the shelf. But then things changed, and now it’s possible, so now we’re doing it.”
Despite this rapid pace of change, and his own expanding list of responsibilities, Ryan seems confident about his team’s future. “I’m a little biased, but I think my team is fantastic. We all get along well. You know, every team is different, but I think my team works really well.”