Team Scaling for an E-commerce Brand
The result, up front
Challenge
An e-commerce brand needed to expand its engineering team quickly to meet a major sales-event deadline.
Solution
We provided pre-vetted React and Node.js engineers who integrated into the client's sprints and followed their delivery cadence.
Outcomes
- Checkout shipped twelve days before Black Friday
- Five engineers working in-sprint twenty days after signing
- Every line owned by the client from the first commit
Where this project started
In July, this US brand's VP of Engineering had a checkout revamp scoped against a fixed Black Friday deadline, and a team of eight that was already fully committed. Local hiring would take a quarter she didn't have. Agencies quoted her project prices for what was really a staffing problem.
She asked us for five engineers who could work inside her sprints, on her repositories, under her code review standards, starting within a month.
The work, including the part that went sideways
We proposed candidates from our bench within a week and she interviewed all of them herself, which we encourage. Five started twenty days after the contract was signed, working a shifted schedule that put them online through the New York morning.
One placement didn't work out, and it's worth being honest about that. A senior engineer who'd interviewed well turned out to be a poor match for their fast, comment-heavy review culture, and by week three the friction was visible in cycle times. The contract covers exactly this, so we swapped in a replacement from the same bench inside five working days, with a handover document rather than a handover meeting so nobody lost a sprint.
The revamped checkout shipped on November 12th, twelve days ahead of the deadline. The brand kept three of the engineers on after the event, and every line written belongs to them, as it did from the first commit.
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