The combined ‘one team’ quickly began work to develop, deploy and scale at rapid speed, using agile processes with minimal waste; achieved by using the same programming language across infrastructure as code, and front and back-end systems.
Teams made up of designers, researchers, engineers, and analysts from both companies collaborated virtually while the UK was in lockdown. They worked together in blended squads functioning autonomously, with each squad managing shared data using EventBridge and Snowflake – a modern data warehouse introduced by Infinity Works. Good communication oiled the wheels and the project kicked off with pair and mob programming – where several engineers worked on the same task – to share knowledge effectively and bring people together.
This collaboration was wildly successful, as cinch and Infinity Works share similar cultures and a willingness to test their skills and tech to the limit. Infinity Works engineers were able to demonstrate lean product engineering skills effortlessly to their cinch colleagues while working in tandem on the same feature. Broader input from Infinity Works also helped inform elements ranging from the user experience and data management to business analytics.
This teamwork and agreeing core principles and working methods up-front, made an agile approach even faster. The combined team first created a ‘walking skeleton’ or bare-bones implementation to decide what automation, integrations and applications were needed. Then they built a minimal, but fully-functional product in four months using rapid iterations.
Challenges were overcome along the way. Giving customers a financing option at launch proved trickier than expected. This was one part of the agile development that couldn’t be shortened, as the team had to comply with financial and retail automotive regulations.
Infinity Works helped cinch set up a new AWS account structure using Control Tower to ensure regulatory compliance and introduced serverless infrastructure on AWS including the use of DynamoDB and key serverless components. This ensured performance requirements were met and migrated from an alternative content delivery network to AWS CloudFront to benefit from improved performance and DDoS protection.
The solution also relied on integration with third-party systems. To create a system that enabled customers to find a car, buy it and then have it delivered, an event-driven architecture was used to ensure asynchronous messaging to integrate with finance providers and cinch’s vehicle delivery services – an end-to-end experience.
