Efficiently Scaling a Startup in Hypergrowth
Calvin Usiri Chief Technology Officer
Ramani
Strategic Technology Planning, Digital Engineering Transformation
Ramani.io is a software platform that captures supply chain data to drive sales visibility and enable resellers to access financial services. Since its inception, the company has grown rapidly with a mission designed to make a broad impact in Africa and a tremendous market opportunity. Founded in 2019 and based in Tanzania, Ramani’s vision is to digitize the African supply chain infrastructure.
SITUATION
Ramani has had the ideal start as a software company – they are at the forefront of a burgeoning market with a distinct offering that unarguably and quantifiably solves a critical problem. In two years of operation, they have grown to 56 employees, hundreds of customers, and strong year over year growth in revenue.
A cutting-edge technology company experiencing hyper-growth has many technical, organizational structures, and process optimization decisions. For Ramani, it is paramount to ensure they innovate rapidly, deliver value efficiently and scale while providing a world-class experience. For example, Ramani needed assistance making design decisions on microservice technologies, inter-service communication mechanisms, engineering organizational structure, and how to gauge the operational impact of their technology choices.
OPPORTUNITY
The CTO of Ramani engaged FifthVantage as a trusted technical advisor based on its experience in rapidly creating large-scale SAAS and Cloud Computing products to aid him in formulating his technology and organizational strategy and tactics. To reach a sound approach, FifthVantage worked with the CTO over two months to perform a current state and desired end state assessment, including technical and engineering approach analysis involving:
- Reviews of existing architecture and desired technical investment decisions for the future
- Assessment of engineering objectives, structure, and team size
- Evaluation of production metric development
- Review and assessment of how to choose technology for use in Ramani’s software
FifthVantage concluded that Ramani needed to make changes in technology planning, organizational design and structure, and operational efficiencies to achieve its 12-18 month goals.
SOLUTION AND IMPACT
It was mutually agreed upon that FifthVantage would assume an advisory role working directly with the CTO to help him implement changes. Within weeks, FifthVantage advised the CTO on a range of technology choices like HTTPS/REST over GRPC for inter-service communication to begin decomposing its platform into additional microservices to enable scale and build other monitoring capabilities to understand production performance. FifthVantage has also helped the CTO:
- Develop a technical decision-making framework based on clear goals, objective analysis, and hands-on assessment
- Optimize his engineering organizational structure for peak digital delivery capabilities
- Develop software and infrastructure architecture diagrams for all audiences
- Develop a methodology for monitoring production performance and availability
- Develop staff assessment capabilities to aid in hiring and managed attrition decisions
- Assistance with the creation of the company’s data privacy policy
As a result of these efforts, Ramani has experienced the following benefits:
30%
reduced decision-making time by using a clear decision-making framework based on data and metrics
90%
improved average response times without increasing spending on infrastructure
100%
improved application availability by minimizing critical errors
FifthVantage continues to serve the CTO of Ramani, helping him evolve the technical strategy of Ramani’s products and the digital engineering capabilities of his team.
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