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 in getting the right guest to the right event - think concerts, sports, culture - while arranging the regulatory requirements of declaring the benefits in kind for participants in these events. Based on people’s individual preferences, the Seaters algorithm will decide who is the next most valuable guest to invite.
The challenge
Over the past 10 years the platform and its feature base grew quickly while the available time for technical refinement was limited. This resulted in an unavoidable build-up of technical debt, making the codebase increasingly difficult to maintain and slowing down the software development process. The Seaters team asked us for an objective technical audit and a technical refactoring roadmap.
Our approach
We identified 4 steps in our cooperation:
Intake: thoroughly understanding the short- and long term goals of the leadership team
Audit: technical and operational assessment of the as-is situation
Refactoring: implementation journey of the to-be situation
Handover: setting the internal Seaters team up for long term success
With support of
Product definition
Refining the action plan
The initial audit showed that there was a need to bring the platform up to the latest technical standards. In order to make this concrete, we embarked on two tracks to lay the foundations for the software engineering work to be done efficiently down the line.
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.
Product development
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.
Foundations to scale
On a journey towards ISO27001
This cooperation with Seaters has been an intense journey with complex engineering challenges and data migrations along the way, all while assuring continuity to over half a million users. We’re truly proud of these achievements.
We can safely say that the technical foundations for Seaters are now stronger and more scalable than ever before. To top it all off, we’re now also assisting their team in setting up an Information Security Management System (ISMS) as part of a journey towards official ISO27001 certification which is a de-facto requirement for SaaS platforms in the context of large corporations.
We loved Panenco’s hands-on approach, immediately highlighting and tackling the biggest issues in improving our technical setup while keeping our business running. Thanks to the diligent engineering work, we feel that our platform again 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.
