The best-performing companies I’ve interacted with excel at learning, adjusting, and executing swiftly. In our ever-changing world, customers’ problems and expectations evolve rapidly, and the ability to launch or improve products quickly is key. But speed alone isn’t enough — high quality, reliability, security, availability, and user experience are all essential for products to be trusted and loved by customers.
I’ve had the privilege of working at several successful companies, thinking I had seen the fastest product delivery possible. I’ve discussed product delivery techniques with friends and peers, presented at conferences and industry events. I believed it was impossible to move any faster.
That belief changed a few months ago when I experienced something entirely new. Imagine you're at an amusement park, boarding a seemingly endless and thrilling roller coaster. As the ride starts, your face distorts with the force, and before you can even scream, you’re at the finish line. This intense mix of emotions and adrenaline makes you wonder if it was all a dream and if you’re eager to ride again. That’s how I felt about the speed our team at Adfin achieved recently.
For a concrete example: On June 10th, we released our first beta version to our customers. Just four weeks later, we developed and released three new large products: Pay by Card (Apple Pay, Google Pay, card on file), full 2-way accounting integration with Xero that always reconciles, and our core customizable workflows. This was accomplished with a small team of four engineers (one of whom had joined only a few weeks prior), a designer, and two persons who spent a part of their time as product managers.
Here are the five main ingredients that made this possible:
- Strong Company Culture
While the term "company culture" is often overused, in my experience, it truly is the foundation of a company’s success or failure. At Adfin, we live and breathe our ATHOS (acronym of our values) principles in everything we do. Stay tuned; I’ll delve deeper into this in a future blog post. - Working with the Best People
My previous role involved leading a large engineering organization with 35 teams across multiple countries. At Adfin, we took a different approach: building a small, elite team capable of moving mountains. You can’t imagine what high-potential, ambitious people can achieve when given the best tools and end-to-end ownership—from infrastructure to backend, frontend, testing, delivery, and customer satisfaction. - Focused, Well-Bounded Work
We operate in 4-week cycles plus a delivery/wrap-up week. Each team member owns a project and enjoys focused work time to ensure fast and high-quality delivery. Unlike many teams that waste time estimating work, we use an investment-driven approach. For each project, we ask, “How much do we want to invest in this project?” If we can’t deliver a good product in half a cycle or a full cycle, we don’t start it. This method ensures full commitment from the team to maximize the return on investment. - Fully Cross-Functional Teams
Our engineers collaborate closely with our designer, and the product manager is involved daily in the work. We also engage customers and prospects in our projects, working with them to understand their problems and validate our ideas. This involves sharing designs, conducting demos, and onboarding beta users for testing. This gives us the ability to build the right product, avoid blockers, and quickly answer questions or concerns. - Quality First Mindset
Giving end-to-end ownership means our team takes quality as a top priority. From day one, they found healthy ways to automate tests for our product. We rely on a suite of unit, integration, and end-to-end tests (API and User Interface) to guarantee our product works as expected. In just a few months, the team delivered impressive products and capabilities, all validated by 1,049 automated tests, with automated scenarios running non-stop in every environment, including production.
These key ingredients make our team at Adfin - and our customers - feel like they’re teleporting on this journey. Simple practices, executed well by an A-class team, have truly moved the needle!
If you’re curious to learn more, follow our Adfin LinkedIn page. We’ll continue sharing various techniques we use to provide super-fast and high-quality product engineering.
