Luxury shopping mall management system

The company, an international investment fund with an office in Spain, needed to solve this challenge: “a luxury shopping mall management system.” The obstacle wasn't purely technical: it was about finding profiles with real experience in premium retail space management systems —access control, luxury tenant management, real-time operational reporting—, a very specific domain where their own selection processes couldn't reliably validate candidates. As a fund evaluating a pilot before committing to a larger investment, leadership also needed to maintain confidence in the process as development progressed: an objective way to ease the natural uncertainty of a project critical to the investment decision, beyond the team's periodic reports. The pilot had a tight 6-month timeline, tied to an investment decision 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 candidates analyzed per position (30 in total), delivering the final shortlist in between 5 and 7 days depending on the profile.

Squad Hiring managed, within 24h, the AOR-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 24h and, as a recurring monthly service, gave the fund's stakeholders an objective read on the pilot's progress and code quality, helping maintain confidence in the process and ease the uncertainty inherent to an investment decision through to final delivery.The Enabling Team brought in a Technical Lead, a Product Designer, a Product Owner, and a Scrum Master, providing product direction and agile discipline to a pilot that needed to prove its value quickly, with a methodology adapted to the client's type of organization and short delivery cycles to validate business hypotheses before scaling the investment.

The squad brought on 10 developers (backend developer x3, frontend developer x2, full-stack developer x2, mobile developer, QA engineer, DevOps/SRE) working on a stack of Node.js (NestJS), React + Next.js, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, GitHub, AWS, and Flutter, proposed by Squadmakers —they become part of the client's team, not Squadmakers'—. The fund had 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.