Clarifying Beyond Finance's architecture

Company Overview

Beyond Finance is a financial services company dedicated to helping individuals achieve financial freedom through personalized debt relief solutions. With a focus on transparency and customer empowerment, Beyond Finance offers a range of services, including debt settlement, financial education, and credit counseling. Their mission is to provide clients with the tools and support needed to regain control of their financial lives and make informed decisions about their financial futures.

Project Overview

Beyond Finance approached Go Between with a challenging problem: their technical systems had become increasingly difficult to strategically manage. As a large fintech organization, the growing complexity of their monolith + services architecture made planning new initiatives feel like working in the dark. The cost required to maintain quality, to ensure good testing practices, and to decompose technical projects was high. Their engineering leadership could identify these problems, but struggled to know where to resolve them within their intricate system. They sought our expertise in translating these fuzzily-defined challenges into specific, actionable solutions.

The key issues they faced included:

Planning work was expensive because their complex system was hard to reason about
Error rates had risen because of unforeseen interactions between their teams and within their codebases
Improving quality and test coverage was slow because there was no clear understanding of where to begin

After evaluating potential solutions, including off-the-shelf tools like Packwerk, we worked collaboratively to develop a custom solution for Beyond Finance called "FeatureMap." Taking inspiration from the open-source CodeOwnership tool, we designed FeatureMap to help identify and organize their products' high-level features directly in their codebases. Decomposing what was once an opaque system into a set of well-defined features allows for discovery, planning, and prioritization to be clearly articulated by engineering leadership.

Go Between is a great consulting partner. I can bring them problems, especially the messy ones, and they solve them independently while maintaining collaborative communication - no need for detailed direction or excessive oversight.

They take a pragmatic approach, never forcing a specific technology or service, but instead working with me to find the best solution, whether technical or operational. They've helped us improve how we do technical planning and project decomposition, raising the quality of our deliverables and making our systems more maintainable.

-- Sergio Rabiela - SVP of Technology

The core of our approach involved identifying these features and assigning all important source files to exactly one feature. This simple organizational structure unlocked significant improvements across their engineering organization. Go Between was responsible for the following areas:

Solution Architecture

Our team evaluated existing solutions and designed FeatureMap to address Beyond Finance's specific needs while minimizing disruption to their development workflow. This required understanding both their technical architecture and their team structure to ensure this solution would integrate seamlessly.

Feature Definition Framework

Go Between developed a methodology and supporting assets to help teams identify and define features within their codebases. This included facilitating workshops with product, engineering, and QA teams to capture feature definitions and initial assignments. This also included monitoring and feedback collection about the process and its outcomes.

Implementation Strategy

We created a low-friction rollout approach which targeted one team at a time. Go Between developed a process to easily manage FeatureMap's initial feature assignment, ongoing verification in CI, and the generation of artifacts that capture key metrics about Beyond Finance's systems.

Tooling Development

Based on the foundational set of features and processes, Go Between developed several supporting tools:

Pull Request Labeling: Automatic labels applied to pull requests which clarified the impact of each change
Targeted Release Notifications: High-signal notifications delivered directly the right team
Feature Dashboard: An automatically generated site which displays a complete picture of the application
Feature Observability: Assignment of each transaction/trace within the observability platform to better understand the runtime performance of the systems' components

FeatureMap provided several key benefits:

Improved System Understanding: Teams gained the ability to reason about discrete components of their architecture — rather than individual files, or their systems as a whole
Actionable Metrics: Feature assignments enabled metrics collection about complexity, test coverage, and overall health for each component
Enhanced Visibility: Teams could better understand how different features compared and interacted
Change Management: Tools built on top of FeatureMap increased visibility into individual releases, as well as how the system changed over time

Go Between has since expanded the implementation beyond the initial monolithic application to include several other projects at Beyond Finance written in various languages. In a post-implementation survey, Beyond Finance's teams reported significantly better understanding of their system: engineers expressed more confidence in making changes, QA teams had clearer responsibility for tests, and product teams gained higher visibility into what was going into production. Most importantly, their engineering leadership now had better tools to prioritize continued improvements.