Successful agile setup with a dedicated team

ImmobilienScout24 is Germany’s leading digital real-estate marketplace and helps users find their dream home. The platform is the first choice among digital real-estate classified platforms for 50% of consumers and provides end-to-end services in the real-estate sector – from property searching, through official documents, to loan agreements.

Industry	Retail
Technology	Java, Spring, Angular/React, AWS, microservices, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL

Unified processes and technology stacks across multiple client projects
Close cooperation between the partners despite working in different locations
Strong alignment with the business objectives in every project
Carefully designed knowledge transfer processes enabling solid knowledge retention

The challenge

Business Need

Since 2013, Objectivity has been working with ImmobilienScout24 both remotely and on site, delivering a broad range of product development services.
The main goal was to support the business growth of the Immobilien group by developing new functionalities of their platform.

Moreover, the Client wanted to unify all processes and technology stacks across all brands, creating a coherent environment where people can successfully work on projects together. To achieve this, we had to set up an agile working environment. An additional challenge was to create and maintain a close and transparent relationship between partners working in different locations.

To achieve success, we adjusted both technologies and ways of working to the needs of our Client. Setting clear rules and expectations upfront helped us to maintain a successful and long collaboration.

The solution

Project Details

At the beginning of our collaboration with ImmobilienScout24, we built teams capable of meeting the Client’s requirements and fulfilling their expectations. The team consisted of technical experts who each had end-to-end responsibility for their work. We worked in tandem with a client-side Product Owner to ensure alignment with the client’s priorities. The team’s goal was to work closely with the Product Owner to understand the challenge and desired business outcome and gather all relevant information. Then, taking on the responsibility for the delivery, we developed the feature and get it live.

Over time, our Client placed great confidence in us, entrusting that we would deliver value to their business. Objectivity’s team now has significant autonomy in choosing their tools and approach. The goal is always to satisfy the business need in a tight timeframe, not to use a certain technology.

To ensure a successful setup and smooth communication between teams, we created the role of a code buddy. A code buddy was a rotating role assigned to each member of the dedicated team for a week. During this time, the code buddy was on-site in Berlin for 5 days every 2 weeks and the team kept on delivering according to the sprint routine.

Thanks to this approach we gained a better understanding of the business context and resources, and we built relationships with other ImmobilienScout24 teams.
Even today, team members travel to our client’s office in Berlin whenever necessary.

The results

Business Benefits

Because our client operates in the very dynamic environment of a digital marketplace, they see technology advancement as a mechanism to gain competitive advantage. With that in mind, ImmobilienScout24 needs to validate new approaches and microservices, and thus it has been necessary for us to be very flexible in our cooperation.

An agile approach and open communication allow us to rapidly adapt to the needs of our client.
Working with ImmobilienScout24, we have developed a knowledge transfer practice which allows the Objectivity team members to share knowledge of client’s systems, business domain and create libraries of developed components, so others can benefit from our expertise and save time. Knowledge retention is one of our main strengths when it comes to team augmentation.

We recognized how important it was that Objectivity’s experts became a part of the Client’s organization. To facilitate this we used sprints, video conferences, standups, retrospective sessions, satisfaction surveys and face to face meetings. All these methods helped us to track progress, identify which things went well and which required improvement, and agree on the next steps to move forward. We always strive to build a positive relationship and eliminate the barriers that can occur when augmenting teams.