Helping 15Five dominate the HR Tech space

15Five is a growing US-based startup behind a SaaS product for employee performance management. Founded in 2011, 15Five has grown to a team of 260 people serving over 2,500 clients, such as Spotify, Hubspot, WPEngine, or Pendo.

15Five helps companies improve employee performance by delivering everything managers need to improve employee engagement and performance, including continuous feedback, objective (OKR) tracking, peer recognition, 1-on-1s, and reviews.

Business

15Five co-founder and CTO, Nazar Ivaniv, first approached Sunscrapers in 2015. Nazar was looking for experienced Python engineers to help grow his SaaS product and join his strong team of 15. He soon encountered the pitfalls of local recruitment.

Nazar wanted to scale his team faster and more efficiently, so he could spend more time focusing on the product and technology. He had very high standards and looked for experienced, self-reliant developers driven by integrity and passion. After our initial consultation, we met in NYC, and Sunscrapers stepped in to help.

Technology

15Five is a web-based SaaS platform serving thousands of users every day, sporting public and mobile app APIs. It consists of application servers, relational databases, caching layer, asynchronous task queues, and many more - all designed for security, scalability, and continuous integration.

Backend development requires designing performant data structures, implementing complex business rules, and optimization of database load. Managing visibility and privacy of data is also a key factor. There are multiple integrations to manage with third-party services, both for back office and the end users. Frontend requires combining different technologies while maintaining consistency, clean look, performance, and responsiveness to deliver a great user experience.

We started our collaboration by assigning one half-time senior backend engineer to the project. Our first job was working with the customer support team to help tackle bugs and reported issues. After a successful first few months, during which we acquired a solid knowledge of the product and codebase, we started working on core elements of the system, as well as some new features. In time, we grew the team of engineers and expanded our support to include frontend development as well.

15Five application at that time was already a product of a significant size that was being developed for several years. At the same time, the customer was planning the development of new complex and important features. The challenge of the project was understanding the legacy codebase, supporting it, and improving it while continuing the development of new parts and maintaining the high quality and consistency of the whole application.

The key element to success in this project was choosing the right people to satisfy the customer's very high standards. 15Five is well-known for its unique company culture and work ethic. Programming skills are paramount. Developers working on the project must have great communication and collaboration skills, understand the complexity of business logic, take responsibility for their tasks, and be independent and proactive team players.

Our developers met the customer's high expectations, and our dedicated team at 15Five continuously grew to become an important part of the larger engineering team. They become key members of that group, valued for their professionalism, communication skills, and high level of involvement in the complete process of product development. The Sunscrapers team led the successful development of important new features in the customer's application.

Their extensive knowledge and collaboration skills were critical when the customer's growing team underwent reorganization to smaller groups and focused on specific areas of the whole application. Thanks to our developers' dedication and experience, they were appointed important technical and team management roles within the new structure.