Last-mile route optimization platform

The company, an early-stage startup in LogisticsTech headquartered in Finland, needed to solve this challenge: “last-mile route optimization platform”. More than business knowledge, what was missing was verifiable experience in the project's specific technical stack: a previous hiring attempt hadn't worked out, generating extra cost and delaying the market opportunity. The team also lived with methodological problems: no clear agile cadence, unreliable estimates, and difficulty consistently prioritizing the backlog. The competitive window was short: a competitor with a similar product was already gaining market share.

Squad Challenge designed 6 challenges, one per position, to evaluate professionals already linked to the client, drawn from its own internal team and outsourcing firms it already worked with, analyzing an average of 5 candidates per position (30 evaluated in total) in 10 days.

Over 12 months, an Enabling Team with specialists in DevOps joined temporarily, focused on speeding up delivery and transferring best practices to the client's team. The methodology the Enabling Team applied was, as always, an adaptation of Agile to the client's type of organization.

The squad was made up of 6 profiles (Tech Lead, DevOps/SRE, Squad Lead, mobile developer, full-stack developer, frontend developer) working on a stack of Go, React, MongoDB, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Bitbucket, AWS, Kotlin (Android) and Swift (iOS), sourced from the client and its outsourcing firms. The company had no consolidated in-house technical team, so this squad, already linked to it through outsourcing, operated as the product's engineering core from day one. Since some of these profiles came from outsourcing firms, their turnover was high (around 50%), which led to evaluating 3 additional replacements over the course of the project, reaching a total commitment of 12 months.