Case Study:

FiscalNote

Data analytics, public policy tracking, and issues management software for the largest most impactful global organizations.

FiscalNote is a publicly traded (NYSE: NOTE) software, data, and media company with offices in the United States, Europe and Asia. After raising north of $200m of funding the newly onboarded CIO had asked us to help rebuild the flagship product, and reinvigorate the R&D organization.

Problem

The product's core architecture lacked a unified technology vision that would guide the team towards effectiveness, rapid-iteration cycles, results-oriented deliveries, productivity, and developer fullfilment.

The flagship product, which boasts many Fortune 500 customers, had numerous problems resulting from an over-engineered software architecture:

Cost of change was high.
High hosting costs.
Instability and degraded performance under heavy traffic.

Solution

Our solution was to rewrite the application in a software framework that prioritized developer productivity and simplicity. This enabled a much smaller team of developers to build new features much faster.

We worked with Leadership to fine-tune the Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery pipeline to enable daily deploys. This opened up the gates for continuous feedback from internal and external stakeholders.

We also trained the internal Engineering team to focus on and prioritize automated testing to reduce the toll on the QA team, and improve the overall build quality.

One of FiscalNote's core features is an ability for ML-backed full-text search across their constantly growing 50m+ data set of public policy data. We had re-architected this feature from scratch and build a "Unified Search & Alerting experience" to allow seamless on-demand access to this data.

Source Labs has been crucial in instrumenting the necessary change management to improve the effectiveness of our R&D organization. They don't shy away from challenges and have tackled every problem we had thrown at them. They are experts in the field and have been a significant force for positive change. We're happy that we've had this team to execute on a complex and successful rebuild.

Ken Kantzer, VP of Engineering, FiscalNote