Surviving and thriving during hypergrowth
How we helped to scale sennder’s tech teams and infrastructure
8x
3K → 30K
25 → 145
sennder is a digital road-freight-forwarder, connecting shippers with carriers through an inhouse developed platform. The company had gone through several mergers and acquisitions which kickstarted a massive phase of hypergrowth. They needed to expand and restructure their product organization as well as their platform architecture. As their product suite became more diversified, their operations teams also needed to support new markets. These teams needed better internal automation to increase their operational efficiency. Excel-based processes just aren’t scalable. On top of that, sennder was also outgrowing its “disruptor” brand identity and needed to reposition itself in the competitive logistics market.
Project A supported sennder heavily in the process of reshaping the organizational setup to support the immense growth of the tech and product team:
- Project A CTO Stephan Schulze assumed the role of an interim CTO and acted as a sparring partner for the founders and tech team.
- He also helped to recruit sennder’s CTO at the time, speaking to over 30 people and formally interviewing 6 final candidates.
- Up to 10 of Project A's Software and Infrastructure Engineers supported sennder by implementing numerous product features in the sennder application stack and also supported their migration from entry-level platform (AWS Elastic Beanstalk) to a more scalable enterprise-grade solution (AWS EKS).
- Project A’s inhouse Talent Acquisition team sifted through just under 2,800 CVs to fill a dramatic uptick on open positions, 70% of which were for the tech team.
- The Project A IT team also helped to onboard the swathes of new recruits with sysadmin support and automated account creation.
Meanwhile Project A’s product and branding teams worked with other parts of the organization:
- Project A's product managers supported the Joint Venture with Poste Italiane onsite in Milan to setup and automate their operational processes on the sennder platform and synchronize with sennder’s other product divisions.
Project A’s Brand team (supported by Design and Marketing) ran several of workshops with sennder management to improve sennder’s brand positioning while taking into account their competitors and complex target audiences (i.e. shippers and carriers).
Whenever you encounter a problem with scaling your organization, you can count on Project A to have the right people to help you solve it.
- 20 new team members alone were recruited by Project A and onboarded in the space of 11 months, the majority being engineers and tech talent.
- An experienced and respected CTO was hired to lead the tech team
- Over the course of 10 months, sennder successfully handled an almost 8-fold increase in monthly load volume from 3k to just under 30k orders (a result of the of their joint venture with Poste Italiane S.p.A)
- By introducing a new deployment process the deployment efficiency has been increased by 85%.
- Within 10 months we helped to scale the tech and product organization from 25 to 145 people.
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Want to learn more? Contact us at stephan.schulze@project-a.com.
Stephan Schulze
