GBH
Scouted
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Maintaining business continuity amidst CTO change for recruitment platform
The Situation
Scouted helps job seekers find roles they were meant for and growing companies find top talent.
Scouted came to us when their founding Chief Technology Officer (CTO) was leaving. Their new CTO reached out to engage and quickly ramp up their team to guarantee business continuity and prepare for their next steps in growth. Within 2 weeks, we were kicking off a single team member and starting the technical transition of the product to GBH’s engineering team.
Scouted’s Context
Vision
Build a meritocratic talent ecosystem that unlocks human potential.
Why
To meet funding goals and grow sustainably.
Goals
- Guarantee continuity of operations with main owner of the tech products leaving
- Control product/engineering costs by leveraging flexible resources for Engineering, Product, DevOps, UI/UX and Quality Assurance
- Establish the first steps to build a 2.0 version of their existing platform
Vision
Build a meritocratic talent ecosystem that unlocks human potential.
Goals
- Guarantee continuity of operations with main owner of the tech products leaving
- Control product/engineering costs by leveraging flexible resources for Engineering, Product, DevOps, UI/UX and Quality Assurance
- Establish the first steps to build a 2.0 version of their existing platform
Why
To meet funding goals and grow sustainably.
The GBH Difference
We adapt
We have proven experience of taking ownership of platforms and have no problem adapting to any stack. GBH believes that technology is just a tool to solve business problems. Because of that and technology’s constant change, we look for great engineers who are more than ‘one-language-seniors.’ In our search, we look for passionate people that have proven experience and are excited about dealing with those changes.
Flexibility across the board
We started at Scouted with one engineer, then moved to two engineers and finally to four, one quality assurance engineer and surgical DevOps engineering work. After the work pipeline was reduced because the initial projects were completed, we went back to two engineers and a quality assurance engineer. We plan to ramp back up as needed to ultimately achieve their aspirational growth targets.
We bring partnership to the table
We like to understand businesses and share our strategic and tactical experience. This translates to our teams by them constantly proposing ideas on how to improve the organization and work product. For companies like us that believe in sustainable relationships, it is very easy to understand that you really are as successful as the results you provide to companies you work with.
What We Did
Take over the product
We received the transition documentation and started getting acquainted with the tech stack. Within a couple of days we were resolving our first ticket and three weeks from there, we had completely taken ownership of the product.
Improve the development process
One of the first things to do was to improve the development process and cadence. We upgraded the ticketing system from Gihub issues to Jira so that product development could be organized and tracked. Additionally, we contributed to the training of their newly appointed product manager and paired her with one of our delivery managers so that she could train on how to write stories and efficiently engage the development team.
Containers and establishing a pipeline
We built containers for the entire infrastructure for two purposes: allow the creation of different environments to test our applications (review apps) and also enhance our ability to onboard new team members. Moreover, we setup Jenkins and CI/CD pipelines that would create a one way process through which Scouted’s code would get promoted to production. With this, we went from a release and pray to a release and relax software organization.
Releasing a new experience on a brownfield system
We built a new application experience. This was a major implementation that required many changes on an existing system and a gradual release of the new version of the product to customers. We built a new React application to separate the client interfaces from the server actions. We defined an architecture that wrapped the existing Python monolith in REST API interfaces to reuse as much of the existing functionality but at the same time start the process of rewriting areas of the product that would require performance improvements. In the end, we launched a major product release less than 8 months after starting to work with them.
Internal KPIs
The Result
Within weeks of partnering, we defined a clear path from requirements to deployment, instituted a ticketing system for central tracking and visibility, set up a sprint structure with deliverable accountability from our engineers, added a QA layer for all deliverables, and started sending weekly reports for at-a-glance visibility into progress and productivity for Scouted’s new CTO and the rest of their team.
We rolled up our sleeves and instituted a multi-faceted approach to ensure the fidelity of what we build in a system that we didn’t originally develop. To ensure business continuity, we made sure to audit the backup and recovery strategy that guaranteed that as we got acquainted to the product, our new changes couldn’t create business losses.
Finally, we continue to work with Scouted after their successful Seed raise in order to deliver the right tools to realize their vision and business objectives. We love to partner with like minded individuals and organizations, which makes us very proud to be a part of the Scouted’s engineering team.
Commitment
In agile projects, daily standups tend to become a place where commitments are made but rarely remembered the next day. We track compromises our team makes which has proven to be a great way to calibrate estimation and utilization.
Quality
We believe that what you don’t measure you can’t change. For all our teams, as part of the execution workflow, we collect data about engineering and quality assurance performance. This translates to tracking the number of times tickets are returned at the QA stage and the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) stage, which in turn allows us to flag when occurrences outside the norm happen.