Pension Lab resolves business scalability challenges by boosting development productivity instead of scaling the team

Development productivity is not about whether your developers are motivated to perform at their best or not. It’s about how much they can realistically do in the environment they are in.

The environment can impact the development team’s performance. The main factor, of course, is the application itself and how it was designed. Any repetitive task that could potentially be automated or at least optimized can become a delivery efficiency blocker. And if you continue to remove these blockers, you might find that you can accomplish the same or even better results with fewer people!

Pension Lab’s original application had nothing wrong with it. It was built to sign up individual users and create custom dashboards for selected pension providers – a task it performed efficiently.

However, the number of pension providers increased, resulting in extensive custom development. Over time, Pension Lab increasingly began integrating entire batches of individual users rather than just one individual at a time. Despite this, each user still required the same amount of manual document processing as it did back in Pension Lab’s early days. The task the app was supposed to perform changed. 

The company faced a conundrum:

1. It was on a roll – it was getting a lot of new clients and wanted even more.
2. It also wanted to continue to innovate, adding new features and capabilities.
3. But supporting the ever-growing user base left little time for anything new.

The Software House has been providing technological support for Pension Lab for a long time. We couldn’t allow technology to be an obstacle to the company’s growth. Together with Pension Lab, we followed a multi-step plan to increase development productivity drastically:

• We wanted to start by optimizing communication with external parties – the system communicates with the external services of pension providers and employers. With some API work, we could perhaps automate some repetitive tasks.

But this could only take us so far. We needed more productivity, so…

• We decided to introduce template-based dashboards – a template like this could potentially be used by business clients as-is or treated as a base to be reworked into something else.

If steps 1 and 2 succeeded, with the expected improvement in development productivity, we could find some time for even more optimizations. 

• We planned to leverage AI-driven automation – we could create a separate app that would automatically gather key information from the incoming documents and categorize it reliably within the system.

The development team’s size has changed according to needs, but overall, it remained limited to 3-5 specialists at a time.

Thanks to close cooperation with the client and continuous improvements in development productivity, it was able to keep up with the pace of Pension Lab’s growth without having to increase its numbers too much.

At different times, the team included three backend developers, a frontend developer, a DevOps engineer, and a Project Manager.

It didn’t happen overnight, but with each development productivity idea implemented, both business and development focused less on busy work and more on creating business value. A new client or batch of users was not a problem to solve anymore.

Yes. It took a lot of time before we cut the business client’s onboarding time from a low of 3 months to a high of 3 days. Each change contributed to this result a little bit.

Client onboarding in 3 days – the road

API optimizations & integrations

Some of the earliest efforts involved extensive API optimization. Where possible, we made sure that third-party platforms could feed data into our platform. That way, they could do much of their work on their side.

API optimization could also help solve the logistical problems of integrating many individuals at once. Third parties can now make special requests to create users on our side. Their profile is pre-populated with most of the necessary data, and they can access their dashboard immediately from our side.

We’re still working on the efficiency of our APIs. Current developments concern money transfers, among others.

Templates

Moving away from the concept of creating an entirely custom-made dashboard for each pension provider proved to be another development productivity milestone. 

We designed a simple, scalable React-based dashboard template. The wealth of experience we acquired over the years helped us ensure that it meets most of a typical client’s requirements. It can be further customized with a few clicks.

The implementation of a dashboard template didn’t compromise the interest of a potential client in any way. They can still expect a fully custom-made dashboard if they want to. However, a template-based version can be launched extremely fast, giving the client a chance to get familiar with the system faster.

For the developer, the introduction of a template-based dashboard meant they didn’t have to do many repetitive onboarding-related development tasks. They had more time to come up with and develop entirely new features.

These changes significantly improved development productivity, cutting the onboarding time of an average business client from 3 months to 3 days.

But perhaps the happiest of all is the Pension Lab team itself. Now, they can hold conversations with multiple potential business clients at the same time, knowing that they have a ready-made white-label product they can show them at any time.

Our ongoing effort to leverage AI capabilities gives hope for another development production breakthrough. A Python-based application we’re working on uses OpenAI to interpret, categorize, and label data. It has the potential to automate a lot of work previously done by admins and developers.