I was brought in to this business as a client had just signed a contract to come on board, and they needed a full-time senior engineer to replace a contracting senior engineer. With a small team of 5 including a founder with grand plans, I spent a fair bit of time at the start learning, absorbing, and seeing what’s what to work out how to improve this business by reducing/hiding the flaws. On to the table:
| Positives | Negatives |
|---|---|
| 6+ months of internal communication history Years of multiple prototype history Long company existance Initial functional MVP Decent client brand history, new big client signed on Direct links / Integrations with Google Public press releases from the founder on their vision | Incohesive codebase Minimal / no infrastructure Very top-down culture, overly corporate for the size Hugely negative trends on glassdoor Cost-cutting hugely apparent Unorganised / difficult to get anything to happen Misaligned / negative / incorrect communication trends |
I think it’s important to dig in to the incohesive codebase as listed above as it’s a huge tell to what the company is like internally. What this indicates is that a number of different developers had worked on it over time, with no overarching guidance. It ends up being a patchwork of different directions and coding styles which while functional means it’s much more time consuming and difficult to add/modify/patch the code as time goes on. This is what is commonly referred to as technical debt and also what the recent vibe coding trend is bringing closer to the surface. For a codebase to succeed well, it needs a person who is across it all and understands it all. This can be applied to anything outside of a codebase also which will become apparent further down in this case study.
Early stage / Existing MVP
This stage was invaluable to work out how to enhance the business and overcome the negative traits. The prior MVP’s showed a clear path of what this business was trying to achieve product-wise, where it was struggling, the sales strategies used & timeframes, and where it was wanting to get to.
The communication history and over-corporateness showed a culture of mis-trust from somewhere, either caused by or causing an imbalance where the people in power/management/leadership abused their positions.
Around the time COVID was starting to hit globally, we were told to prepare for a huge influx of customers – 4000 of them from a single offshore brand, along with another 1000 or so from a different industry, and a partnership that promised 30,000 individual customers through a third party. The existing MVP had no chance of delivering on this, so it was time to build what would make this company scalable and sustainable using the strengths of the staff, and attempting to hide/neutralise the weaknesses from the new customers.