Introduction
Beyond Finance is a financial services company creating customized debt management and consolidation solutions for consumers. Their platform houses a multitude of applications: Salesforce, web and mobile frontend clients, a Salesforce backend database, backend APIs, a payment/escrow processor, and a task runner. This is an ongoing project where Tandem has helped streamline both technical and cultural decision-making through team integration.
The Challenge
Beyond Finance had been using a legacy platform that heavily depends on Salesforce. As their internal team worked on the project, they realized they needed support to achieve their goals.
The Tandem team was brought on to build strong, internal processes that would lay foundations for the team’s long-term success.
From the get-go, we provided technical and consultative support so they could focus on building up a strong, internal, full-time development team. Beyond Finance is a forward-looking company, so to invest in their future success they wanted to look at their agile and team practices and improve them.
Over time, our role has evolved and we have a larger footprint, as we are actively building processes to help them reach their goals — which is the real win. In 2022, they quadrupled their volume of clients.
Legacy System
When Tandem first joined the team, Beyond Finance had a microservice architecture with lots of pain points:
Tandem supported Beyond Finance in consolidating the code for things like ORM, logging, and traffic into packages for reuse across the microservices. Now developers could seamlessly change code and apply it to a microservice.
Next up was consolidating the domain model and logic into one place. Tandem showed Beyond Finance the benefits of a majestic monolith: developer experience, easy-to-understand frameworks for interacting with external systems, error handling & reporting, and managing complexity with feature flags.
We helped integrate their systems with New Relic, which provides value across the organization with visibility and post-release tracking. Other Tandem-led projects within the organization include building APIs and workflows to automate manual processes, introducing an extensible rules engine, refactoring backend processes, and maintaining API endpoints for Salesforce, web, and mobile clients.
Team Practices
Beyond Finance self-identified that their team wasn’t functioning the way they wanted to. As their team grew, the day-to-day programming tasks became challenging: how to think about sprints, completing code reviews, pragmatic decision making, pairing, and following agile processes.
Working with consistency and empathy, Tandem developers led the team in iterating on current processes. The Beyond Finance team felt empowered to be part of a cultural transformation that enabled them to meet their goals well into the future. When Tandem rolled off the project, these devs were ready to become successful team leads.
Here’s what we did:
Refined a working approach centered around de-siloing information and encouraging communication
Proposed more frequent pairing to avoid falling into siloed practices
Created retro guidelines with a rotating moderator to ensure everyone on the team has a voice
Established a weekly venue for developers to build camaraderie and practice technical presentation skills
Built templates and coached the team on documentation, turning a dreaded to-do into a painless task
Mentored developers interested in leadership roles by building up their technical savvy and providing expertise on creating processes, partnering with stakeholders, and enacting solutions.
Throughout our engagement with Beyond Finance, we have transformed their team practices, helping make positive cultural and technical changes. Their team has leveled up from a group of cowboy coders struggling to manage timelines to a cohesive team actively improving.
Tandem being a constant and helping all the things around the work has made the work go smoother — allowing Beyond Finance to continue iterating on their hiring process and building strong software.
