Building an app that offers rewards to users for their Uber and Lyft trips.
Freebird Rides operates a national platform that provides consumers rewards and cash back whenever booking an Uber/Lyft ride. Businesses (in particular bars and restaurants) use Freebird Rides to acquire customers by reimbursing an Uber ride up to a cap the business sets only for customers who dine and drink at the establishment.
The challenge Freebird faced was that they had quickly gone to market using rapidly built technology that was not scalable. They lacked product delivery experience, resulting in a platform with many high-priority features but no user research or validation. This led to a complex, fragile system with spaghetti code, making it difficult to maintain and evolve. Changes in one area often caused regressions in another, creating a fear of touching the code base and necessitating extensive testing for any modification.
The solution provided involved introducing robust product development workflows and a dedicated team, including product owners, project managers, and QA specialists. We established an ongoing cycle of discoveries around features, ensuring proper discovery, design, user validation, and testing before development. This process ensured that by the time features reached the roadmap, they were well-validated and worth the engineering effort.
On the technical side, we addressed the backend's monolithic structure by migrating to a serverless, event-driven microservice architecture. We split the application into service domains, each with its own database, improving maintenance and isolating issues within specific domains. This re-architecture also optimized costs, as serverless microservices automatically scaled based on traffic, reducing expenses by 25% while handling 100x the traffic.
Additionally, we transitioned their mobile application from native iOS and Android to React Native. This allowed for simultaneous iOS and Android releases, reduced development time from one year to four months, and achieved full feature parity plus a redesign. This transition improved speed, reduced staff requirements, and enabled all JavaScript-experienced engineers to contribute to the app, enhancing overall development efficiency.
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Building an app that offers rewards to users for their Uber and Lyft trips.
Freebird Rides operates a national platform that provides consumers rewards and cash back whenever booking an Uber/Lyft ride. Businesses (in particular bars and restaurants) use Freebird Rides to acquire customers by reimbursing an Uber ride up to a cap the business sets only for customers who dine and drink at the establishment.
The challenge Freebird faced was that they had quickly gone to market using rapidly built technology that was not scalable. They lacked product delivery experience, resulting in a platform with many high-priority features but no user research or validation. This led to a complex, fragile system with spaghetti code, making it difficult to maintain and evolve. Changes in one area often caused regressions in another, creating a fear of touching the code base and necessitating extensive testing for any modification.
The solution provided involved introducing robust product development workflows and a dedicated team, including product owners, project managers, and QA specialists. We established an ongoing cycle of discoveries around features, ensuring proper discovery, design, user validation, and testing before development. This process ensured that by the time features reached the roadmap, they were well-validated and worth the engineering effort.
On the technical side, we addressed the backend's monolithic structure by migrating to a serverless, event-driven microservice architecture. We split the application into service domains, each with its own database, improving maintenance and isolating issues within specific domains. This re-architecture also optimized costs, as serverless microservices automatically scaled based on traffic, reducing expenses by 25% while handling 100x the traffic.
Additionally, we transitioned their mobile application from native iOS and Android to React Native. This allowed for simultaneous iOS and Android releases, reduced development time from one year to four months, and achieved full feature parity plus a redesign. This transition improved speed, reduced staff requirements, and enabled all JavaScript-experienced engineers to contribute to the app, enhancing overall development efficiency.
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