On-time delivery 7 weeks from nothing to MVP 37 touch points
Within budget 1 app/developer/month 450 apps
In early 2019, Polestar had an exciting challenge: sell cars exclusively online.
This required managing all customer interactions online.
But the technical solution was a blank slate. Besides a few inherited systems from Volvo Cars Manufacturing, Polestar had no IT infrastructure and only a handful of developers for a challenge that demanded an army.
In car manufacturing failures can be expensive, irreversible and even deadly.
Software development is different: learning from mistakes is an important part of the process.
Yalta's capacity to build quickly and improve based on user feedback helped Polestar experience firsthand that speed leads to efficiency.
Fail fast does not mean "work recklessly." Yalta's governance framework provided direction and enabled quick decisions in a complex and rapidly growing organization.
The governance framework has been so effective that its basic logic still exist several years later in Polestar’s decision hierarchy, and can be seen in their communication channels, templates and software tools.
To move as quickly and flexibly as possible Yalta and Polestar created an entrepreneurial spirit that entrusted development teams with important decisions.
Since it was safe for major decisions to be made at the team level, more people were willing to contribute creatively to a common goal. Culture is knowing how we do things without any given instructions.
A few core features of Yalta’s setup helped deliver high quality to Polestar at an extremely fast pace:
A recruitment machine: Polestar’s strong brand and the cutting-edge tech stack we had chosen together enabled us to attract talent. We built the capability to lead hundreds of interviews, recruit and onboard an average of 10 new team members every week, continuously for 4 months, rapidly expanding the organisation from 6 to 86 people and from 1 to 11 teams.
A platform team: one team was dedicated not to feature development but solely to resolving common issues, building reusable components (for authentication, security, monitoring etc.) and core services for developers. Although the team didn’t produce anything visible from an end-user viewpoint, it accelerated the efficiency of all other development teams by a 10x factor.
An ultra lean PMO: (Project Management Office) in charge of removing all political and logistical roadblocks for the teams, championing & securing the organization’s culture, and continuously giving Polestar a clear grip on cost, work allocation and development progress, without micro-managing.
The main challenge was what to focus on: what is important when everything is important?
Our streamlined governance asked a simple question, will this help us sell cars in January 2020? This question gave us the focus to prioritize the work.
And by January 2020 Polestar was selling cars online. In 9 months Yalta helped build Polestar's IT infrastructure and delivered the ability to grow sustainably.
