D3: Do it right, do it fast, do it once

A Fintech Company’s Journey to Rapid Expansion and Enhanced Developer Efficiency

// case study

Summary

Objective
UI/UX Modernization, Developer Enablement Tools, Framework Tuning and Optimization
Industry
Fintech
Stack
React, Typescript, Postgres, Google Cloud Platform

Context

A rapidly expanding fintech company aimed to break into untapped financial spaces where competition is intense. Their mission was to maximize funding for startups by identifying and automatically applying for tax credits and other opportunities for scale, while taking a small fee. Development speed and efficiency were of critical importance, as the company needed to swiftly establish a strong presence in the market.

Strategy

The company implemented the following strategies to achieve its objectives:

 

  1. Modernization of UI/UX to provide a seamless and engaging experience for users.

  2. Development of developer enablement tools and utilities to reduce time to market for high-value features.

  3. Tuning of the software framework to improve performance and streamline development processes.

The engineering team was divided into two groups: a pairing and test-driven development (TDD) team, and a team without these practices. The goal was to evaluate the effectiveness of pairing and TDD strategies in terms of code quality and delivery consistency.

Features were designed to consider a company’s size and resources, enabling the automatic identification of potential tax discounts and other opportunities for scale.

Results

  1. The pairing and TDD team delivered more solid and tested code compared to the team without these practices. This result highlighted the benefits of pairing and TDD in the development process.

  2. Execution and delivery remained consistent throughout the entire engagement, ensuring a steady stream of high-quality software releases.

  3. Developer enablement tools greatly reduced the time to market for specific high-value features, enabling the company to rapidly push into untapped financial spaces.

  4. The enablement team in particular made a significant impact by reducing initial application deployment time. This was achieved through the creation of foundational building blocks that could be utilized by all staff engineers.

     

The fintech company successfully modernized its UI/UX, developed powerful developer enablement tools, and optimized its software framework. These strategic improvements allowed the company to swiftly penetrate new markets and establish itself as a formidable player in the fintech industry, while also ensuring a high level of efficiency and quality in its software development processes.