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Getting a digital platform ready for scale
Technology & Software
Creating a customer-focused approach to feature development for a growing employee experience software company
In today’s dynamic job market, employees are no longer committed to working for the same employer throughout their careers. Instead, high-performing employees will actively seek out better opportunities if they are unsatisfied with their current workplace. Understanding your employees, developing a positive workplace culture and investing in staff development is no longer optional if a company wants to retain its skilled workforce and thrive.
This changing employment landscape meant our client, a provider of employee experience software, was experiencing rapid growth. As demand for its services increased, it needed to ensure its platform was prepared for rapid scaling.
Equal Experts worked with the client to provide hands-on support, embedding a consultant into the platform team to demonstrate best practices within event-driven architecture, upskill the team on platform functionality and set up monitoring and alerting to support operations. A customer-focused approach to feature development, including the importance of user research and value-led prioritisation, was also introduced helping to create a strategy for further feature development.
In just three short months, our client’s platform team was left with the knowledge, capabilities and confidence to deliver the features needed for the growth of the business and ensure its platform can rapidly scale.
Outcomes
One roadmap
aligning the platform team behind clear priorities
Embedded partnership
developing client skills through demonstration of best practices
Creating a roadmap
for development based on user research
About the client
Our client is an Australian-based employee experience platform providing businesses with engagement, performance and development tools to improve their organisational culture, develop high-performing teams and retain talent. The platform has more than 6,000 customers globally, helping to support 25 million employees.
Industry
Software
Organisation size
6,000 global customers
Location
Australia
Length of project
3 months
Challenge
Preparing a platform for rapid growth and increasing demand
The past few years have seen organisations globally endure significant change. Companies have been grappling with the increasing popularity of remote work, the growth of new technologies and an uncertain economic climate, all of which have had an impact on their workforce and employees. Businesses recognise that investing in their employees, building a positive culture and retaining top talent is vital to drive success.
Many organisations turned to companies offering employee experience software, such as our client, in order to better understand their employees, build high-performing teams and drive change in their business.
Our client was in the process of scaling up to meet the increasing demands for its services. It needed to ensure that its platform had the agility to respond to this growth and that its team had the skills to design and deliver value-adding features quickly.
Solution
Embedded partnership to demonstrate best practices and build capabilities
Our client’s platform team was using Kafka as part of their event-driven architecture and data pipelines approach, however, they lacked a long-term strategy and the deep technical knowledge to maximise their efforts and enable the platform to grow quickly.
We worked with the client in an advisory capacity at first, examining its current ways of working, its architecture and its Kafka capabilities in order to provide advice about the best way to improve. However, early in the engagement, it became clear that a more hands-on form of support would offer the most value to our client’s needs and we quickly pivoted our approach. We embedded two members of EE within the platform team so they could showcase and embed best practices as well as support skill development through pair programming. As part of this work, we upskilled the team on the best ways to get functionality into the platform and set up monitoring and alerting to support operations.
Creating a user research-driven roadmap for development
Without a clear roadmap or set of priorities, the platform team was driven by the capabilities and limitations of the platform itself, rather than creating features which would add the most value to users. This led to a lot of time and effort being spent on low-value work which ultimately would not support the organisation’s growth.
We guided the team to understand the value of user research and to focus on the needs of the customer when considering what features and elements of the platform to develop. By incorporating this approach into the platform roadmap, the entire team gained clarity on upcoming features, their value to customers and the business, and the best design practices to meet user needs.
Results
A customer-focused approach to development
Our client now possesses a solid engineering, data and delivery foundation for the development and growth of its platform. The team now follows a roadmap and has a customer-focused approach to feature development, ensuring the speedy delivery of high-value elements that benefit both customers and the business.
Pivoting our support and embedding EE consultants enabled significant upskilling within the team within Kafka and event-driven architecture. The platform team now has the necessary capabilities and, more importantly, the confidence to deliver the features required for the business’s growth.
Following the engagement, we also provided the client and their senior team with insights gathered in order to further their growth. This included highlighting key strengths within the organisation, as well as areas for improvement with this constructive feedback from an experienced third party welcomed by the client as part of their ongoing improvement journey.
By adopting a customer-focused approach to feature development and leveraging our embedded partnership, our client successfully prepared their platform for rapid scaling.