A dedicated technical refactoring trajectory for this enterprise SaaS product
About the client
Seaters is an enterprise SaaS product providing an online platform for large corporations to manage guest invites to business events. The software assists to invite the right guest to the right event - think concerts, sports, culture. Based on people’s individual preferences, the Seaters algorithm will decide who is the next most valuable guest to invite.
The challenge
After 10 years of growing their platform and feature set, the Seaters team asked us for an objective audit to map out the state of affairs. This required us to gain a deep functional and architectural understanding in a short period of time.
Our approach
We identified 4 steps in our cooperation:
(1) Intake: thoroughly understanding the short- and long term goals of the leadership team
(2) Audit: technical and operational assessment of the as-is situation
(3) Refactoring: implementation journey of the to-be situation
(4) Handover: setting the internal Seaters team up for long term success
With support of
Shaping the game plan
The initial audit showed that there was a need for a technical evolution: moving from a monolithic application architecture towards a cloud-native, serverless setup. At the same time we concluded that the overall user experience was up for rejuvenation. Therefore we defined two tracks to lay the foundations for the work to be done.
Design track
We mapped out all existing user journeys and assessed the critical paths in the UX of the application. As part of our deliverables we set up a full-blown design system in Figma with the desired end state of the user experience.
Architecture track
We formalised the existing architecture and AWS infrastructure and benchmarked it to industry standards with regards to cost, performance, scalability and security.
Implementing a new target architecture
Based on our findings, key decisions were made:
(1) Breaking up the monolithic architecture into microservices capable of handling specific tasks
(2) Leveraging serverless functions in AWS to improve autoscaling
(3) Reducing the overall hosting cost by over 50% while improving the site reliability
A dedicated Panenco team worked shoulder to shoulder with the Seaters engineers to implement these changes while keeping the existing platform up-and-running.
We loved Panenco’s hands-on approach, immediately grasping our business and demonstrating high technical acumen. Thanks to the diligent engineering work, we feel that our platform has the technical foundations for the next phase of its growth.
Jean-Sebastien Gosuin
Founder CEO Seaters
In summary
Seaters is an impressive product and company that needed technical assistance to get their foundations ready to grow further. We gladly jumped in to apply our whole playbook going from a management intake and a technical audit towards a dedicated refactoring trajectory and handover to their team.
We wish the Seaters team the very best of luck as they further expand across Europe. We’ll be happy to keep supporting you in every way possible.
Let's build!
Are you looking for an entrepreneurial digital partner?
Reach out to hello@panenco.com.
