🚀 365 Days of Stories: Day 28 - A Strong Partnership and Global Expansion

After aligning with my counterpart at the customer’s side, we made it clear: no blame game. Our focus was on ensuring the project came out of the crisis and went live before the existing vendor’s contract expired.

My counterpart on the customer side was a strong technical leader, and together we formed a dynamic partnership. With over 10 systems to integrate, we shifted from using stubs to real system integrations, tackling one issue at a time.

⚙️ The Integration Phase: Real Systems, Real Progress

With the integration of real systems, the project finally began to function from an integration perspective. We started hitting the real APIs and resumed UAT (User Acceptance Testing). However, things didn’t go smoothly. The business users started testing, and they were not happy. They pointed out several functional bugs.

The clock was ticking, and we also had a timezone gap to deal with. If we followed the standard bug-fixing timeline, we would never clear UAT on time. So, we made a bold decision, which was expensive but the fastest option during the UAT phase.

✈️ The Bold Move: Sending Top Team Members to the Customer’s International Location

We sent our top 2 team members to the customer’s location, and that’s when the magic happened. They were able to fix bugs on the spot and also educate the customer on how the system worked. We began working almost round the clock in 3 shifts to catch up.

This allowed us to move forward quickly, and soon, the customer started to appreciate our partnership. But, as things progressed, they realized that most of the blocking issues were on their side, not ours.

👥 A Strong Leader on the Customer’s Side

Given that our product involved integration with many internal systems, the customer decided to bring in a very senior leader to help navigate the cross-team dependencies.

I must say, he was one of the finest leaders I’ve worked with. In every turnaround I’ve experienced, there’s always been a strong senior leader on the customer side who plays a critical role in stitching teams together. Navigating internal teams at the customer side is never easy without their top leader’s support.

We had daily meetings where more than 10 teams would join to discuss interdependencies and work on the timeline to keep things moving.

💪 The UAT Phase and the Final Push

We spent almost 3 months in the UAT phase, and finally, after 6 months of hard work, the project went live. It was a collaborative effort, with intense work across both our teams and theirs.

🌍 A Strong Partnership and Global Expansion

Through this process, we built one of the strongest partnerships at the leadership layer, and the project went live across 5 countries. This was one of the best engagements for us in terms of global expansion and was a testament to how powerful teamwork and partnership can be in a crisis.