Stabilizing crawler technology/proxy infrastructure, optimizing customer journey and developing a product roadmap
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Tarik Hennings

Agile IT-Project Lead/Engineering Manager from ITUB

Our first Challenge.

BENY-Repricing is a SaaS offering repricing services to E-Commerce vendors on shopping platforms like Amazon, Idealo.de, google.de or Check24.de and many more. Over 1.000.000 products get repriced with sophisticated repricing algorithms every day.

BENY struggled with a technically instable product and a shrinking customer crowd. They had tried to work on these issues themselves. But after many attempts to solve the technical problems of the product, they decided to integrate external help.Therefore, the management entrusted me with the task of solving the problems. My roles were defined as product manager and as agile IT-project lead/engineering manager half half.The project was written in perl in monolithic style having a lot of technical debt. Rebuilding bigger parts of the application with remote team and different freelancers were necessary. The technical and product turnaround had to be done in parallel which was quite a challenge.

Our mission:  making a turn around from technical and from product perspective

My roles were defined as product manager and as agile IT-project lead/engineering manager half half.

‍Our first step was forming a team and creating the product turnaround roadmap for stabilizing BENY 3.0 to stop customer churn and make it state of the art again. This was done by different tasks carried out:

  1. Technical Turnaround stabilizing old crawler technology and proxy infrastructure building monitoring and load balancing systems
  2. "Quick fixes" improving customer onboarding and user experience/customer journey
  3. Creating industry catch up Product Roadmap developing and researching state of the art features like new dashboard or repricing logics

Our next challenge: App and customer portal migration project 

Our second step was rebuilding BENY 3.0 step by step into BENY 4.0 written in Python + reactJS. Therefore the following tasks were needed:

  1. Creating Product Roadmap for BENY 4.0
  2. Doing technical refinement of new system architecture
  3. Creating transitional system architecture

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Our outcomes during the project period

- Achieved technical stability within 8 months by stabilizing old crawler technology and proxy infrastructure, establishing monitoring and load balancing systems after creating an industry catch-up product roadmap with state-of-the-art features

- enhanced customer onboarding and user experience by breaking up the monolith and implementing "quick fixes”.

- Realized significant product improvements and industry competitiveness after 18 months, resulting in a 10% annual growth rate and a reduced churn rate of 5% by developing a product roadmap for BENY 4.0., refining the new system architecture and designing transitional system architecture for a smooth shift.