Luxury shopping mall management system

The company, an international investmentfund with an office in Spain, needed to solve this challenge: “a luxuryshopping mall management system.” The obstacle wasn't purely technical: it wasabout finding profiles with real experience in premium retail space managementsystems —access control, luxury tenant management, real-time operationalreporting—, a very specific domain where their own selection processes couldn'treliably validate candidates. As a fund evaluating a pilot before committing toa larger investment, leadership also needed to maintain confidence in theprocess as development progressed: an objective way to ease the naturaluncertainty of a project critical to the investment decision, beyond the team'speriodic reports. The pilot had a tight 6-month timeline, tied to an investmentdecision window that left no room for delays.

Squad Challenge designed 6 challenges,one per position, based on the luxury mall's own business case —access control,tenant management, and operational reporting—, with an average of 5 candidatesanalyzed per position (30 in total), delivering the final shortlist in between5 and 7 days depending on the profile.

Squad Hiring managed, within 24h, theAOR-based hiring of the 10 developers validated through Squad Challenge,handling contract generation adapted to each developer's country of origin,data validation, and the onboarding process.

Squad Master AI was installed within 24hand, as a recurring monthly service, gave the fund's stakeholders an objectiveread on the pilot's progress and code quality, helping maintain confidence inthe process and ease the uncertainty inherent to an investment decision throughto final delivery.

The Enabling Team brought in a TechnicalLead, a Product Designer, a Product Owner, and a Scrum Master, providingproduct direction and agile discipline to a pilot that needed to prove itsvalue quickly, with a methodology adapted to the client's type of organizationand short delivery cycles to validate business hypotheses before scaling theinvestment.

The squad brought on 10 developers(backend developer x3, frontend developer x2, full-stack developer x2, mobiledeveloper, QA engineer, DevOps/SRE) working on a stack of Node.js (NestJS),React + Next.js, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, GitHub, AWS, and Flutter, proposed bySquadmakers —they become part of the client's team, not Squadmakers'—. The fundhad no in-house technical team, so this squad, together with the Enabling Team,operated as the pilot's engineering core during the 6 months of development,laying the groundwork for a potential scale-up phase.