Tech North Star for a logistics trading platform
After multiple cycles rewriting a global logistics player's in-house trading platform, our Tech North Star finally launched them on growth.
When tech direction is correct, current systems are mature yet growth and velocity lagging, leadership and team shared mental model is the key.
*: estimated figures from client interviews half a year later
What the business got
Challenge
Client was a global logistics player with monthly multiple thousands of large shipping contracts traded on inter-continental shipping lanes.
They developed their in-house trading software which allowed their staff to conduct logistics decisions over specialized software, but they remained attached to their Excel sheets managed over 6 teams and continents in real time.
Our KPI: after 3 times full rewrite and years of delay in promised features, achieve full adoption.
Strategy
While client's architecture optimized for decoupling in depth (domain oriented architecture), that gained them large initial velocity as each domain was delivered with separate teams, cross-domain features dominated the later stages lagging.
We augmented with senior engineering that can move between domains and implemented the pillars necessary for developer enablement in such a large scale system.
Our delivery
Client stakeholders and implementation teams needed to have the same understanding of where trade-offs are present - their own Tech North Star formalized and agreed upon.
While our teams continued to deliver the backlog features with redesigns included, I led the hard conversations. Each stakeholder wanted contradicting features, blamed implicit decisions for blocks in delivery.
They prepared for the 4th rewrite from scratch when we managed to show the current architecture supports their next decade of roadmap if the missing pillar is implemented, development enablement:
- reusable components along domain frontends instead of copy-pasting,
- common security model vertical along domain backends,
- statistics domain instead of cross-syncing all entities to all domains.
Outcome
When the Tech North Star and ADRs were instituted and synced along the entire delivery team and stakeholders, common understanding of bottlenecks opened the work to improve their velocity.
Over coming months, implementing standardization along all existing domains, they achieved a 50% velocity uplift for new cross-domain features.
Observability and alerting reduced user complaints by 30% in first months, adoption rate increased by 80% in first half.*
Client testimonial
"The Tech North Star is our best ever document thanks to Sandor, that we got from any consulting engagement, we will use this for years to come"
— senior Solution Architect
The team setup
Scope
Build · high effort
Platform · highest effort
Change · moderate effort
Decoupling · upfront
Squad
Product owner
5 product analysts
6 full-stack engineers
3 uX/UI designers
Whose people
ours
the client's
The container architecture
Macro-services approach powering numerous features pay off differently when low user-base or performance needed, but velocity of delivery suffers.
Separating responsibilities, blast radius of changes and new features can lead to a brick wall in velocity, clear communication eases the trade-off.
Federation: domain specific frontends collected into one portal for end-users hiding complexity.
Domain slices: decoupling in depth, a storage level management fully operation while any other domain is out of commission to protect mission critical domains.
Cross-domain concerns are the most challenging to implement as they require extensive engineering effort to capture without ending up in a sphaghetti code.
The delivery calendar
Colors by teams, as the DevEx work starts to take hold, the other teams speed up in delivery of their roadmap.