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Case Study: Turning Around a Stalled Platform with Strategic Technical Leadership

by | Uncategorized

Stabilizing Development, Restoring Confidence, and Building for Scale

Overview

A rapidly growing gifting platform approached Briebug during a period of significant dysfunction. Feature development had slowed to a crawl, releases were plagued with defects, and critical workflow issues were allowing users to bypass key pricing constraints. Stakeholder frustration was high, and confidence in the product direction was eroding.

Introduced through a mutual connection, the client sought a partner who could assess the root causes, provide technical and organizational clarity, and help chart a path forward.

Our Approach: Assess, Align, and Execute

We began with a comprehensive technical assessment, reviewing the architecture, codebase, workflows, and development practices. Our team conducted in-depth interviews with developers, product managers, project managers, executives, marketing, and sales to understand pain points from every angle — both technical and business.

Key Insights:

  • Years of accumulated technical debt and inconsistent environments
  • Security vulnerabilities related to access control and credential management
  • A lack of a structured, scalable delivery process
  • Misalignment across departments on how work was planned, prioritized, and executed

What We Delivered

🔁 Agile Transformation & Planning Alignment

  • Implemented a formal Agile process with clear sprint cadence and cross-team communication
  • Introduced a unified prioritization workflow connecting Product, Engineering, Customer Success, and Support
  • Guided a successful restructure of the technical team, improving collaboration and ownership

🧩 Jira Standardization

  • Rolled out Jira as a single source of truth for discovery, development, and support workflows
  • Centralized all feature requests, bugs, and internal needs via a Jira intake process
  • Mapped Git workflows to Jira stages, clarifying deployment ownership across Dev, QA, and UAT

⚙️ Environment & DevOps Modernization

  • Aligned dev, staging, UAT, and production environments with standardized database schemas and deployment history
  • Replaced outdated Webpack builds with Vite to streamline front-end development
  • Fixed GitHub-related memory issues and established Git hygiene standards (commit squashing, ticket tagging, branch naming)

🔒 Infrastructure & Security Hardening

  • Rotated and removed hardcoded API credentials
  • Locked down AWS and RDS access, removing legacy IPs, inactive keys, and unused VPN tunnels
  • Revoked obsolete access to GitHub, Vercel, and DNS systems, eliminating security gaps

✅ Quality & Test Automation

The Results

Within months, the platform went from stalled to stable. Leadership regained confidence in the team and product direction. Releases became predictable, user experience improved, and the technical foundation was realigned to support future innovation.

“Briebug helped us identify the real issues and execute a plan to get control back over our product. It was more than just code — it was the clarity and structure we needed to move forward.”
— Client Executive