A simpler foundation
A more focused architecture helped a smaller team deliver new features faster.
The context
A flagship product ready for its next chapter.
FiscalNote is a publicly traded software, data, and media company with offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Following significant growth, its newly appointed CIO asked Source Labs to help rebuild the flagship product and reinvigorate the R&D organization behind it.
01 · The challenge
Complexity was slowing the entire organization.
The platform's architecture lacked a unified technical vision. That made changes expensive, delivery unpredictable, and it was difficult for developers to do their best work.
- 01High cost of change across an over-engineered system.
- 02High infrastructure and application-hosting costs.
- 03Instability and degraded performance under heavy traffic.
02 · The rebuild
Simplify the platform. Strengthen the practice.
We rebuilt the application around a framework that prioritized simplicity and developer productivity, then paired the technical work with changes to delivery, testing, and feedback.
Daily delivery
We refined the CI/CD pipeline to support daily deployments and continuous stakeholder feedback.
Quality built in
Automated testing became an engineering priority, reducing pressure on QA and improving build quality.
03 · The product
One search experience across a vast policy dataset.
We re-architected FiscalNote's ML-backed full-text search and created a unified way to find, monitor, and act on public-policy information.
04 · The result
A platform and team built to keep moving.
- 01A faster path from product decision to production release.
- 02A smaller engineering team able to build and iterate more effectively.
- 03Continuous feedback made possible through a daily deployment cadence.
- 04Seamless, on-demand access to a growing dataset of more than 50 million documents.
Source Labs was a significant force for positive change. They tackled every challenge we put in front of them and helped us execute a complex, successful rebuild.Ken KantzerCo-founder and CTO of Truss, former VP of Engineering at FiscalNote