Programmatic ad buying platform

The company, a scale-up in AdTechheadquartered in Mexico, needed to solve this challenge: “programmatic adbuying platform”. Internal interview processes couldn't validate whether acandidate truly understood the business domain, beyond purely technical commandof the stack, which had led to hires that didn't work out. On top of this,there were methodological problems in team and project management: inconsistentagile ceremonies, poor visibility into dependencies, and a delivery cadencethat was hard to predict. The context was one of accelerated growth, withinvestment already committed and high expectations from leadership and, whereapplicable, investors.

Squad Challenge set up 4 challenges, oneper position, focused on professionals who already had a relationship with theclient —from its own team or from outsourcing firms it worked with—, evaluatingan average of 5 candidates per position (20 in total) in 7 days. Since the teamalso carried methodological management problems, Squadmakers recommended addinga Agile Coach to the squad to bring order to ceremonies, planning, andpriorities.

The squad was made up of 5 profiles(data engineer, Squad Lead, mobile developer, Tech Lead, Agile Coach) workingon a stack of Go, React, BigQuery, ClickHouse, GitLab, Azure, Kotlin (Android)and Swift (iOS), sourced from the client and its outsourcing firms. This squadintegrated with the company's existing in-house technical team, respectingestablished processes and priorities. Since some of these profiles came fromoutsourcing firms, their turnover was high (around 50%), which led toevaluating 2 additional replacements over the course of the project, reaching atotal commitment of 16 months.