How do you onboard a major new client when your platform isn’t ready yet?
Extending a global marketing production and procurement company’s B2B e-commerce platform in just two months, enabling the onboarding of a major new client worth tens of millions of dollars annually.
The challenge
They had just secured a major new client worth tens of millions of dollars annually. There was one catch: its B2B e-commerce platform couldn’t yet support the new client’s requirements.
Every user and ordering site needed to be linked to a specific campaign budget, ensuring that orders for marketing materials were charged correctly and spending stayed within limits. The platform’s existing access and identity rules couldn’t support this.
The deadline was fixed at four months, but the scope was still evolving, with no detailed roadmap or fully defined product vision. With its internal engineering teams committed elsewhere, the company needed a partner to take ownership of delivery end to end.
Having worked closely with its product organization for over a year, Emergn was trusted to take on the challenge.
Approach
Speed alone wouldn’t be enough. The platform needed to unify user and group data, integrate securely with existing systems, and meet enterprise security standards, all while requirements continued to evolve.
Guided by our Value, Flow, Quality (VFQ) principles, we assembled a dedicated engineering team and established a high-velocity delivery model from day one, built around:
- One-week sprints, with production-ready demos and short video walkthroughs to keep stakeholders informed.
- Vertically sliced user stories, focused on delivering end-to-end value.
- Continuous prioritization, using story mapping and close collaboration with the client’s product and account teams to focus on what mattered most.
- Continuous discovery and delivery, running in parallel to adapt as requirements evolved.
Our existing relationship with the client helped accelerate alignment and decision-making, keeping the team focused on delivering value. On average, user stories moved from design to done in just 1.5 days, including development, testing, and automation, enabling rapid feedback and measurable progress every week.
The solution was built on a cloud-native architecture using .NET, React, and Microsoft Azure, with secure APIs, single sign-on (SSO), and automated DevOps pipelines, creating a scalable foundation for future growth.
Our impact
In just two months, half the time available, Emergn delivered a fully functional, integrated platform, enabling the client to successfully onboard its new customer.
Through continuous prioritization and a focus on delivering value, the team achieved more than originally expected:
- 4x more mission-critical features delivered than initially planned.
- Six weeks of low-priority development avoided, allowing the team to focus on higher-value functionality.
- 50% faster delivery, with the platform launched in two months instead of the four-month window.
The team reinvested the time saved into accelerating the client’s product roadmap. Beyond the immediate results, the company now has a secure, scalable foundation for onboarding future clients with complex requirements, alongside a proven approach to faster, more predictable delivery.
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