Transforming DevEx for a Global Leader in Travel Technology

The Challenge

Breaking Silos and Building for Scale

Over the past few years, a global travel technology leader was struggling with a fragmented development ecosystem. Years of acquisitions introduced operational silos, inconsistent tools, and inefficient workflows. Frequent shifts in their IT strategy compounded these challenges, disrupting long-term planning and leaving teams reliant on fragmented tools and methodologies.

Ultimately, the goal was to build a developer ecosystem capable of scaling alongside the company’s growth, empowering teams to deliver exceptional experiences to millions of customers worldwide. This vision served as the North Star, guiding the complex and ambitious transformation required to achieve it.

At its core, the Internal API Store was designed to be more than just a repository of tools. It was envisioned as the foundation for a unified developer experience—a single point of computation where teams could align their workflows, integrate with ease, and innovate without the burden of operational inefficiencies. Together, we aimed to tackle these critical pain points head-on, ensuring consistency and alignment across internally developed tools and applications.

By breaking down organizational silos and standardizing processes, the client sought to overcome five key challenges:

1. Frequent Strategic Shifts:
   ‍Over the past two years, the client’s IT direction had changed at least three times due to turnover and shifting priorities at the C-suite level. This created instability and difficulty in setting long-term IT strategies.
2. Organizational Silos:
   With multiple acquisitions under its belt, the company found itself with a patchwork of teams, each operating with its own tools and processes—creating inefficiencies that hampered collaboration and innovation. This siloed approach hindered collaboration, resource sharing, and alignment across the organization.
3. Cloud Operations & Tech Stack Fragmentation:
   With disparate teams using varying technologies and methodologies, finding a unified standard for cloud operations and technology stacks became essential to improving efficiency, reducing redundancies, and enhancing scalability.
4. AI and Emerging Technology Readiness:
   ‍Adapting to advancements in AI presented challenges in terms of skill development, deployment of AI-driven solutions, and fostering an innovative mindset across teams. The organization also needed to address gaps in AI-related documentation, processes, and tools to leverage its potential effectively.
5. Knowledge Management and Accessibility:
   ‍Existing repositories, documentation, and technical resources were fragmented and inconsistent, leading to inefficiencies and duplicated efforts. Enhancing these elements was crucial to creating a seamless experience for developers and teams to access and utilize shared knowledge effectively.

The Solution

Engineering a Unified Developer Experience

Our approach was based on aligning with the client’s established delivery framework while driving significant process improvements. By working within the existing sprint-based delivery cycles, we ensured that our contributions integrated smoothly into their Agile workflows. This alignment minimized disruptions and allowed us to deliver value without impacting ongoing operations.

We deployed a team of nine engineers with expertise in DevOps, support, and software development. This team offered tiered support and development services, addressing critical technical and operational gaps.

Our engineers led initiatives to enhance CI/CD processes, optimize cloud operations, and standardize tools across diverse teams. To address fragmented workflows, our engineers implemented a Feature Branch Deployment solution using GitHub Workflows and Spinnaker, enabling contributors to test changes in isolated environments without full-stack deployment. This automated process cut deployment setup times from hours to minutes. This solution improved collaboration, reduced conflicts, and ensured better integration across teams.

Additionally, our senior engineers have worked on various software development projects, leveraging tools like Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, and Backstage, to align the client’s internal tools and platforms with their evolving IT strategy.

What made this project particularly unique was the proactive deployment of initiatives like Feature Branch Deployment. While adhering to the client’s current priorities, we found opportunities to optimize processes and address underlying inefficiencies. This initiative reduced setup times for testing environments from several hours to just minutes, enhancing productivity and improving developer workflows.

This seamless integration into the client’s workflow allowed our developers to optimize these various projects in the ways that brought the most value to the client.

Measurable Impact

Our work has led to significant efficiency gains, both for our internal team and external contributors.

1. Internal Team Improvements:

• Deployment Time Reduction: Previously, it took 4 hours to manually deploy the entire stack to test a Frontend (FE) Feature Branch. Now, only the FE needs deployment, and the process is fully automated, saving valuable time.
• Faster PR Reviews: Each pull request (PR) review used to require 1 hour since changes had to be manually set up locally. Now, with easy access to Feature Branches, reviews are much more efficient.‍

2. Efficiency Gains:

• Faster Testing for External Teams: Testing used to take ~3 hours in the dev/test environment. Now, external contributors can test and merge PRs much faster—often immediately after approval, or with minimal wait time.
• Reduced PR Merge Time: While internal PRs average 20 hours due to longer review cycles, external contributions now benefit from a streamlined approval process, significantly cutting down merge times when submissions are complete and correct.

3. ‍Long-Term Outcomes:

• Increased Developer Productivity: By removing manual setup steps, both internal and external teams can focus on development rather than troubleshooting deployments.
• Improved Collaboration: External teams can contribute more easily, leading to a more streamlined development process.
• Reduction in Operational Overhead: With automation handling deployments, there’s a measurable decrease in redundant effort and time spent on setup and testing.

Ultimately, our work together resulted in faster feature development, higher adoption of processes, and a more efficient workflow for everyone involved.