The Challenge
Laava is a Sydney based tech startup responding to a surging demand for transparency and trust – a global issue across all industries. They’ve developed the Laava Smart Fingerprint® as a more secure physical-to-digital link, a unique identifier capable of securely authenticating all things with only a smartphone.
The monolithic codebase initially developed for Proof of Concepts by an offshore team was difficult to maintain and extend into a scalable product, and Laava undertook a complete rewrite to break the monolith into multiple microservices.
Alembic was hired to build an exemplar GraphQL API with NodeJS and to influence and promote engineering best practices such as shortening release cycles amongst others.
The Solution
Alembic understood that in order to have positive and lasting impacts on Laava's engineering culture, we had to influence the team not by telling but by showing and involving them. Through building a core backend service together as a team, we began to introduce practices like feature flagging to enable us to deploy new code safely, test-driven-development to write cleaner code etc.
We also started doing regular showcases with the entire business to increase visibility on team progress and most importantly, to encourage folks across business functions to communicate and share ideas with one another.
Outcomes
Alembic helped Laava replace their legacy system within a quarter with a scalable and performant production platform which developers deploy to multiple times daily with confidence. The most important/ valuable outcome however, is that Laava has since launched their product to multiple early adopters and we are now able to iterate quickly in response to customer feedback and to validate business hypothesis to find the product market fit.
Why We Love Laava
Laava is solving a very hard problem and they have a team of people who are passionate in that problem space. Because of that raw passion, they are resilient to many challenges thrown at them and they are open to different and better ways of working to fine tune their approaches to bring their vision to life.
