From Bottlenecked Platform to High-Velocity Delivery Engine

A high-value asset tracking platform arrived with a familiar story: a codebase inherited from a prior agency, a growing business that couldn’t afford to slow down, and a backlog that measured ambition in years rather than sprints.

The previous vendor had built a working system, but the architecture reflected decisions made for an earlier version of the business. Older .NET and jQuery-era patterns sat alongside newer requirements. Technical debt had accumulated unevenly—some areas were stable, others broke when you touched adjacent features too aggressively. The platform wasn’t failing, but it was running out of headroom at the exact moment the business needed more of it.

Backlog Pressure Outpaced Delivery Capacity

The problem with technical debt isn’t just what it costs to maintain. It’s what it prevents you from building.

Every week brought new stakeholder requests: process improvements, CRM capabilities, inventory tooling, integrations, reporting, security hardening. The ideas were sound. The prioritization conversations were productive. But delivery throughput couldn’t keep pace with intake. Features sat in the backlog not because they were deprioritized, but because the existing delivery infrastructure couldn’t metabolize work fast enough.

This is a common legacy-platform pattern. Each new feature takes longer than it should because the foundation underneath demands workarounds. Testing is unpredictable because the codebase has hidden coupling. Deployments carry risk because the architecture wasn’t designed for the release cadence the business now requires. So backlogs grow, momentum stalls, and the gap between what the business needs and what the platform delivers keeps widening.

Stabilize, Then Scale Throughput

The first weeks weren’t spent building features. They were spent understanding the system and its stakeholders well enough to stop breaking things.

Stabilization meant untangling the areas where feature work in one part of the platform cascaded into failures elsewhere. The turning point was applying Fixation’s proven architecture pattern, which is designed from the start to isolate change, reduce coupling, and prevent ripple effects when business needs shift. Once core operating processes were aligned to that pattern, the team shifted to converting backlog into shipped increments on a weekly cadence.

The delivery rhythm centered on daily working sessions with stakeholders—not status meetings, but working sessions where decisions got made in the room, blockers surfaced in hours rather than days, and priorities stayed synchronized with reality instead of drifting between planning cycles. That tight feedback loop mattered more than any single technical decision. When the people making product decisions and the people writing code share the same conversation every day, delivery velocity compounds.

Modernization ran alongside feature work, not instead of it. Key product surfaces moved to React. Azure hosting and scalability posture improved. Deployment practices hardened. Security investments rolled out in phases. None of this required pausing the feature pipeline. The platform kept shipping while the foundation underneath it got stronger.

Security also needed to be rebuilt from a weak starting point. When the project changed hands, the platform did not have the level of protection expected for a system supporting a growing business. The work focused on raising the security baseline across authentication, account controls, and release discipline without disrupting day-to-day operations. The team also implemented proactive alerting so engineering could detect system and data issues before business users were impacted.

What Shipped Across the Engagement

The breadth of shipped work tells the story better than any single feature highlight.

Core process and review capabilities expanded through multiple design iterations. A purpose-built CRM with integrated email processes replaced fragmented account management tools. Inventory systems gained modern filtering, search, and reporting surfaces. Front-end experiences moved to React where it unlocked speed and maintainability. Intelligent automation and decision-support tools reduced manual effort in key business processes. Authentication scaled from a basic posture to hardened, default-on policies. Hosting and infrastructure moved into a more resilient and scalable configuration.

The aggregate throughput behind this work was substantial. In the highest documented year, the team completed 2,535 tasks with a sustained weekly release cadence. The repository recorded over 15,000 commits and more than 2,000 merged pull requests in a single year. That volume reflects a delivery engine running at full capacity across many capability domains simultaneously—not a burst of activity on one feature.

Once the delivery motion stabilized, major features routinely landed ahead of schedule. Across the portfolio, significant capabilities often shipped around 20% faster than original estimates—redesign work estimated at a week and a half completed in under ten days, and scoping efforts expected to take half a week wrapped comfortably inside their estimate windows. That consistency turned forecasting from a source of anxiety into a planning advantage.

“From a planning and forecasting perspective, it is great knowing where things are at with the project and when deliverables will be met.”

Where the Platform Is Now

The backlog still grows. That’s the sign of a healthy business with more ideas than any team can exhaust. The difference is that the platform now has the delivery infrastructure to absorb that demand without falling behind.

Technical debt is managed, not eliminated—because elimination was never the goal. The goal is a platform where the foundation supports the pace the business sets rather than constraining it. Architecture decisions that once slowed every feature now enable fast, parallel work across capability areas. Releases happen weekly without ceremony. New ideas move from intake to production in days or weeks, not quarters.

“Fixation has not only welcomed these changes, but built upon our ideas to make the final outcome better.”

“We look at the Fixation Team as a true partner to our business and not just a vendor.”

The platform that arrived overloaded and underpowered now operates as a scaled delivery engine—shipping continuously across core processes, CRM, inventory, automation, and security, with room to absorb whatever the business needs next.