Services: Mobile & Web Applications , Monitoring, Maintenance & Support , Technology Assessments
At a Glance
The customer approached us to help them manage a sprawling platform comprised of a custom CMS and a web of API-driven microservices supporting critical customer service and sales functions.
The legacy platform, built by a combination of third-party agencies and in-house engineers, had grown organically to support the team’s evolving needs. The platform’s crisis-driven evolution caused it to become both critical to the company’s success and a significant liability. As usage climbed, outages became common. New features were bolted on to meet urgent business needs, creating a fractured, confusing user experience. This friction was rapidly consuming both technical and administrative resources, creating a serious drag on growth.
Convertiv was engaged to stabilize the existing platform, design a replacement, and engineer a migration to a significantly improved customer-facing application as quickly as possible.
Mitigate the legacy application’s ongoing security and stability risk. Our DevOps team integrated our instrumentation and monitoring into the existing system. By wrapping the legacy code and infrastructure in our operational tooling, we were able to get real-time insights from across the entire system. Once we could see the current state, we shifted to offense, anticipating problems before they were disruptive to the business.
Build an operationally sound, well-documented central API. With a clear view of the business objectives, we set to work engineering a new platform. First, we built an extensive model of the existing platform, visualizing every data object and consuming service. We consolidated the scattered microservices into a single, stable, well-documented API to connect the various customer-facing appliances without risking the operational stability.
Design an intuitive common interface to reduce application-related customer service. We built a powerful, reactive, browser-based user interface with a new design and a clear visual language. This interface provided a shared user experience for both the service team and customers. We carefully modeled each stakeholder’s user journey, focusing on maximizing efficiency and minimizing friction for each persona.
Engineer a bridge that allowed progressive transition from the legacy system to the new platform. To deliver a quicker result, we designed a hybrid system, breaking the new platform’s development into phases. We built a temporary asynchronous message bus that allowed communication between the legacy platform and the new platform. This allowed us to transitioned the customer-facing interfaces first, while keeping the administration and management in the legacy CMS.
99.9968% uptime – Prior to remediation, the legacy system was experiencing several hours of downtime per month. Our instrumentation gave us deep visibility and enabled proactive improvements, eliminating critical performance bottlenecks. Since the launch of phase 1, the new platform has recorded 99.9968% uptime.
60% reduction in time-to-MVP – The transitional system we engineered cut the time-to-MVP for the platform by 60%, pushing significant improvements into our customer’s hands quickly.
Improved UX and efficiencies – The UX improvements have improved platform adoption and significantly reduced customer service and training burden. We continue to work closely with the customer service staff, evolving the platform to meet ongoing needs using a newly developed design system that keeps updates quick and consistent.
Created internationalization capabilities – Following the platform’s success domestically, we added features to support internationalization, allowing the European and Asian sales teams to use the platform to support their international customers.
reduced time-to-MVP
system uptime
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