Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Driving Innovation with Platform Standardization at Capital One (PRT221)

Summary

• Kathleen DeValk from Capital One discusses the importance of platform standardization to drive innovation and provide a unified user experience.
• Capital One faced challenges with disparate user interfaces, technology stacks, and tooling, leading to a disjointed customer experience.
• The mission was to create an award-winning, unified user experience across all software applications and communication channels.
• A common platform was built to enable developers to easily create new features and applications, accelerating product delivery and improving the user experience.
• The platform approach allows for standardization, automation, and reuse of common capabilities, which simplifies the learning curve for developers and enhances operational efficiency.
• Capital One's platform strategy includes building for excellence, enabling collaboration, being agile and customer-focused, and automating everything.
• The developer community is engaged through a developer portal, training, solution architect community, stakeholder engagement, and feedback mechanisms.
• Empowerment of the developer community is achieved through contribution models, extensibility, ownership, and operational support tools.
• Jade Chu, VP of Engineering, shares the journey of building Capital One's UX platform, leveraging AWS services for resilience and security, and improving the developer experience through monorepos, common tooling, and a self-service portal.
• The platform has led to a significant reduction in customer-impacting incidents, improved automation, and a better developer experience.
• Capital One measures success through adoption, convergence, platform usage metrics, and feedback mechanisms like Net Promoter Score.
• The platform enables independent feature development, personalized customer experiences, and continues to win awards for its banking applications.

Insights

• Platform standardization is crucial for large organizations like Capital One to manage complexity and maintain a consistent user experience across various products and services.
• By focusing on a common platform, Capital One has been able to reduce the learning curve for developers, enabling them to contribute more effectively and efficiently.
• The use of AWS services such as CloudFront, S3, VPCs, Route 53, and security tools underscores the reliance on cloud infrastructure for building resilient and secure platforms.
• The transition to monorepos and the adoption of a graph-based build system have streamlined the development process, reducing dependencies and improving build and merge times.
• Capital One's approach to engaging the developer community through self-service portals, training, governance reviews, and feedback forums is a model for fostering innovation and continuous improvement.
• The platform's success is measured not only by its technical capabilities but also by its adoption among developers and the satisfaction of the internal and external customers it serves.
• The transformation from a complex, intertwined codebase to a modular, feature-driven architecture has enabled Capital One to deliver personalized and award-winning banking experiences to its customers.