Scaling a BI Platform With an Extended Product Development Team
Maruti Techlabs became a Berlin-based BI platform's full-time extended development team, replacing unreliable freelancers with stable engineering talent.
At a Glance
A growing business intelligence platform needed to fix performance issues introduced by rapid growth, but a bad experience with freelance talent and a limited local hiring pool were slowing everything down. Maruti Techlabs stepped in as a dedicated, augmented product development team.
Industry
Software (Business Intelligence)
Function
Product Development & Engineering Augmentation
Solution
Dedicated Extended Development Team
Engagement
Augmented Team Model, Scaled From 1 to 5 Engineers
The Client
Our client operates a leading business intelligence platform that helps companies track, visualize, and manage their data. Based in Berlin, the platform helps businesses understand what's happening inside their operations and uncover insights hidden in their data to drive growth.
The Challenges
Growth Outpaced the Platform's Foundation
As the platform's popularity and user base expanded, unoptimized code and legacy features surfaced as real inefficiencies, and the founders knew this couldn't compromise customer satisfaction, security, or their ability to respond in real time.
Inefficiencies Were Costing Real Users
Platform slowdowns were causing users to drop out sooner, directly hurting the customer journey and business performance, and the team knew this had to be fixed at the structural level, not patched over.
Freelancers Over-Promised and Under-Delivered
The client first tried scaling development capacity through freelance platforms, but months of frustration followed as freelance talent failed to deliver on expectations.
The Local Talent Pool Couldn't Support the Roadmap
A limited talent pool across Germany and Bulgaria made it a major bottleneck to grow an in-house team, and hiring, onboarding, and training a new high-performing team from scratch would take far longer than the business could afford.
Time Was the One Resource in Short Supply
With structural improvements, faster page speeds, redesigns, and streamlined workflows all queued up, the client needed a reliable development partner who could start delivering against the roadmap immediately.
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The Solution
An Augmented Team Built on Three Core Principles
Our sales team reached out at the right moment with exactly the kind of partnership the client was looking for: an augmented team model where our developers become a full-time extension of the client's own team, built around three core principles.
We paired team members based on prior working history, so collaboration was smooth from day one rather than something we had to build from scratch.
We paired team members based on prior working history, so collaboration was smooth from day one rather than something we had to build from scratch.
The Journey
Extended Team Growth
Business Outcomes
A Platform Built for the Next Stage of Growth
Structural Issues Got Fixed, Not Patched
Structural improvements, redesigned legacy features, and compatibility enhancements meaningfully improved the user experience and set a strong foundation for future features.
The Extended Team Fit Right In
Our developers complemented the client's existing team well, with the client retaining full control over the extended team's workflow and task allocation.
Speed and Transparency Drove Real Agility
Fast onboarding and direct communication through Slack and shared tooling boosted agility, engagement, and collaboration across both teams.
The Partnership Kept Growing
The collaboration has continued for more than a year, with the scope expanding from WordPress and React work into broader web development as trust deepened.
Conclusion
A dedicated extended team improved platform performance, accelerated product development, and provided the engineering capacity to support the client’s growing roadmap.
Tech Stack
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Frequently Asked Questions
The freelancer model gave the client individual contributors with no guarantee they'd worked together before or shared a consistent process. The augmented team was deliberately built around three principles: shared working history, matched skills, and mixed seniority, so it functioned as one accountable unit against the roadmap rather than a set of separate hires.
The pilot covered a couple of real platform integrations rather than a sample task, letting the client evaluate project management and delivery transparency on live scope. It was that experience, not a sales pitch, that led the client to sign on for an extended team.
The engagement started with one engineer covering the platform's immediate WordPress and React needs. As the roadmap expanded into backend data work, like the Singer.io integrations and custom connectors, the team scaled to five engineers and added PHP, database handling, Python, and AWS to match the new scope.
The client's CTO retained control over workflow and task allocation throughout. Our team translated the CTO's feature overviews into user stories that fed the roadmap, but the client kept prioritization and scope decisions rather than shifting them to the vendor.
As trust built through consistent delivery on the initial integrations, the client kept widening the scope handed to the extended team, moving from focused integration work into broader web development ownership, rather than winding the engagement down once the original backlog was cleared.