Empowering sevDesk's Tech Team
We consulted the CEO and Tech Team of Sevdesk to improve their software development process and help with the migration to a new tech stack.
The Challenge
SevDesk is a fintech company that offers accounting and tax software as a service and is among the market leaders in a difficult market. Their target audience is small and medium sized enterprises that come with all sorts of business models. The complexity of use cases is high and catering to all their customer’s specific needs is their biggest challenge. Adding more and more users as well as features presented another challenge - a legacy system that didn’t scale as quickly as the company.
In order to take in more and more customers the product development became sales oriented instead of following a customer centric approach. In addition to that the testing setup was not automated resulting in quality assurance being a bottleneck that slowed the whole company down.
Despite the slower development, the customer base grew faster and faster. As the number of users grew, it became increasingly difficult to prioritize which features to develop. Since the company had built a team around an outdated tech stack, they also needed help to refactor their code base to become faster and more efficient.
The Obstacle
The leadership team was lacking experience in organizational design, their product team wasn’t trained in product discovery and the tech team was only proficient in the old tech stack. They decided to get outside experts in to do the heavy lifting, set up new processes, and coach their team. They were willing to invest in their employees as they knew it was hard to find good talent in their region.
The Solution
We identified the strengths and weaknesses in the product team and set up new processes. One by one we coached three product teams to apply a product discovery process. We used an example use case to practice the methodology with real customers. We collected valuable feedback for future product development.
We set up a new production environment allowing the team to thoroughly practice in the new tech stack. We then helped to migrate the first set of features into the new tech stack. Eventually, we set up an automated test approach and trained the staff to apply the new processes.
We suggested an organizational setup that put product development at the center of the organization following a customer centric approach.