Fractional CTO for Logistics and Supply Chain Management
Hailify hired RedCorner for our CTO As A Service to take over and manage their India-based engineering team and provide technical leadership across the board.
Overview
The Hailify development team is entirely located in India; however, they were staffed mainly by junior developers and made some critical technical and architectural mistakes. Much like how many startups evolve without proper technical leadership, they moved from their product-market-fit phase to their seed stage after signing some pretty big clients.
The management team also needed technical leadership to get them through their lack of visibility into the business and ability to expand into warehousing on top of their existing logistics and delivery business.
Problem
Hailify's engineering team did a great job with the skillset they had in place; the problem was that none of the employees had direct experience in high peak throughput systems that are common with logistics and delivery operations.
Their technical architecture was inappropriate and used an aging version of the dotnet framework that was out of support; their deployment model relied on a single individual, lacked automated testing and had no thought of the developer experience. This leads to low velocity with the engineering team and continuous downtimes.
The operations side of the business was located halfway around the world in New York City; as such, communication was difficult and limited to a specific time period in the mornings in Eastern Standard Time. Operations lacked visibility into what was going on with the business and wholly relied on aging data that was pulled on a nightly basis into Excel files.
Decision Point
The Hailify development team is entirely located in India; however, they were staffed mainly by junior developers and made some critical technical and architectural mistakes. Much like how many startups evolve without proper technical leadership, they moved from their product-market-fit phase to their seed stage after signing some pretty big clients.
The management team also needed technical leadership to get them through their lack of visibility into the business and ability to expand into warehousing on top of their existing logistics and delivery business.
Solution
Hailify's engineering team did a great job with the skillset they had in place; the problem was that none of the employees had direct experience in high peak throughput systems that are common with logistics and delivery operations.
Their technical architecture was inappropriate and used an aging version of the dotnet framework that was out of support; their deployment model relied on a single individual, lacked automated testing and had no thought of the developer experience. This leads to low velocity with the engineering team and continuous downtimes.
The operations side of the business was located halfway around the world in New York City; as such, communication was difficult and limited to a specific time period in the mornings in Eastern Standard Time. Operations lacked visibility into what was going on with the business and wholly relied on aging data that was pulled on a nightly basis into Excel files.
Red Corner Impact
RedCorner was with Hailify for close to 10 months, the lasting impact was as follows:
The engineering team was self-sufficient and no longer needed an FCTO or CTO, for that matter.
We hired a principle engineer for the team in India to support the team on a longer basis.
The velocity of the engineering team improved from releases every 2-4 weeks to every day.
Eliminating the "key-man" problem, they no longer had this dependency on a single individual.
The engineering team could do more with the same staff, thereby reducing future costs that were attributed to hiring more. engineers
The relationship between business, product and engineering significantly improved.
Their evolved technical foundation could serve their growth of up to 1 million orders per day and scale far beyond that.
Each engineer gained close to 10 years of experience through RedCorner's integrated coaching approach.
The engineering team now has a hermetically sealed end-to-end testing to simulate processes across their entire stack, allowing developers to take calculated risks while preventing anyone from breaking anything. This allowed them to tackle technical debt without worries.
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