how starcity scaled their distributed engineering...
TRANSCRIPT
CASE STUDY
HOW STARCITY SCALED THEIR DISTRIBUTED ENGINEERING TEAM FROM ONE TO ELEVEN WITH ANDELA
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Real Estate
CASE STUDY
PARTNER OVERVIEWStarcity creates coliving housing that fosters community
and intentional social living, making major urban areas
more affordable and less isolated.
THE CHALLENGENeeding to ramp up a new mobile app development,
Starcity sought to get a team of qualified developers
producing quickly to avoid lost time and productivity.
THE SOLUTIONStarcity onboarded a pod of three Andela developers,
already trained, connected, and ready to start delivering
on day one.
Clojure, Clojurescript, React, React Native
and PHP
50–100
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We needed to scale, and we were challenged by the fact that we couldn't find people with the right skillset. Even when you bring on more experienced engineers, you lose one to three months of productivity while they get acclimated to new stack.
- Allen Price, Software Engineering Manager, Starcity
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THE CHALLENGE
With their coliving sites filling quickly, Starcity
wanted to grow beyond its desktop/web-
based platform and offer its community
members a mobile app. After evaluating several
options for mobile development, including
Clojure, Clojurescript, native iOS, or Android
development, CTO Josh Lehman wanted to
find a balanced, middle-ground approach. With
Software Engineering Manager Allen Price,
he decided to seek a set of java developers.
A major hitch for Starcity: hiring and onboarding
qualified local talent and coalescing a functioning
team would take time, and they needed to
ramp up quickly. “Hiring in San Francisco is
generally a hard thing to do. It’s a job-seeker’s
market,” Josh reflects. Allen adds, “Even with
more experienced engineers, you lose one to
three months of productivity while they get
acclimated.”
Just months before, Starcity onboarded their
first Andela engineer, Cecilia Wahome, who
quickly learned Clojure, took over maintenence
and redesign of the company’s website—freeing
up enough bandwidth for Starcity to launch two
new major initiatives. Cecelia’s successes made
Andela Starcity’s natural choice for help scaling
an entire distributed team.
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impact, high-leverage project for Starcity. An
early onsite meeting forged a positive working
relationship. “It was a great opportunity to get
to know them better,” Brandon states. “Our
relationship...helps us have better trust, better
empathy, and allows us to deliver better results.”
The pod was “contributing huge value right
away. They integrated with the rest of the team
and elevated some of our processes and standards
on how we do code reviews,” Allen Price explains.
“The team wildly exceeded expectations.”
Starcity then expanded its distributed team even
further. In late 2018, they decided to move
some of their software offering out of Clojure
and into Javascript.
They hired a senior frontend engineer locally,
and turned again to Andela to build out a team
to support him.
Today, Andela engineers, at eleven total,
outnumber local hires. These eleven, along
with six developers in San Francisco, comprise
Starcity’s web front-end, mobile, and back-end
teams, and they all work together seamlessly
to help Starcity build and scale faster.
CASE STUDY
THE SOLUTIONRather than going through the time-consuming
process of building an on-site team one developer
at a time, Starcity brought on an entire team at
once not once, but twice.
Called a pod and made up of a range of experienced
and developing engineers, Dennis, Jimmy, and Kimo
came to Starcity already trained by Andela, knowing
how to work together, and ready to hit the ground
running on day one.
“This was a great opportunity to bring on a team
right off the bat to focus on a totally new product,”
recalls Josh Lehman.
The pod, along with Starcity Director of Product
Management, Brandon Quinn, took up the
challenge and worked independently on this high-
We have Andela developers paired with San Francisco
developers across all of our teams. They all work
together. They do remote pairing on a regular basis.
They’re basically members of the team.
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Andela spends a lot of time working with their developers
on communication skills, both written and verbal . [They discuss] how to have tough conversations, and how to give
and receive feedback. Knowing that they come in working so well together helps us move much more quickly.
- Allen Price, Software Engineering Manager, Starcity
