About the company*
The client is a New York City–based company with 100+ employees that sells a subscription-based software-as-a-service (SAAS) product.
Challenge
The company wanted a boutique consulting firm to help their technology group with an agile transformation while delivering software critical to their business.
Solution
Discovery and planning
The company was undergoing a transformation, and they wanted to be able to streamline their team to be more efficient and effective. Originally, a Stride Delivery Principal was brought in to analyze the team and understand what needed to be done to improve the technology organization.
Stride’s Delivery Principal interviewed executives, stakeholders, and staff to understand the culture, how things were prioritized, and how they were engineered.
Through those interviews, we gained an understanding of the engineering and product teams and the people who were on those teams. Working with stakeholders from the company, we identified products to build and the engineering teams that would build them.
Separately, at the same time Stride was conducting the discovery process, the CEO of the company determined that they needed an Interim CTO to lead the technology group. The Delivery Principal assumed the role of Interim CTO and took on the responsibility of leading the technology group and formulating a technical strategy.
Consulting and building
The company’s 50+ person engineering group included 40 offshore engineers. As a result of due diligence, Stride’s Interim CTO reduced the offshore staff by 50% in order to focus the remaining team on well defined priorities. Additionally, four new teams were created to back the product initiatives they had been working on.
- Team 1 focused only on fixing bugs. It was composed entirely of offshore engineers.
- Team 2 was a greenfield team. The Interim CTO mentored this group in Extreme Programming (XP), resulting in a high-performing team.
- Team 3 was a hybrid team of engineers having both front- and back-end experience, who started reskinning the application and created APIs that drew off the back end.
- Team 4 was focused on replatforming. This team was composed of more experienced internal engineers, who focused on re-architecting the application.
Transition and training
Stride worked with the company to launch job searches for a DBA (database administrator) and a CTO. This included building everything from the job description to the interview process.
Stride teams handed the project off to product and to the internal lead on the greenfield team. Stride’s Interim CTO worked with the lead engineer and CEO to transfer their responsibilities.
Results
- Stride’s Interim CTO put programs in place to upskill the technology and product teams. This resulted in high-performance teams with a shared understanding of technical excellence.
- Stride successfully hired an internal DBA for the company.
- The Interim CTO led architectural design and strategy, resulting in new approaches to building software.
*Due to the sensitive nature of this project and the early stage of the company, we have redacted all sensitive information.
