Case studies / Product recovery
I brought a technically troubled outdoor-activities aggregator back to working order: tens of thousands of providers and hundreds of thousands of activities.
Tens of thousands of service providers. Hundreds of thousands of leisure and activity options.
An aggregator of this scale lives on constantly changing data, and its search has to calculate distances precisely. I joined when the product was technically failing at exactly that.
A catalogue is only the beginning. A complex data structure, continuous interactive updates and precise geographic calculations must all work at once without getting in each other's way.
There is no ready-made solution for this: you have to design it yourself.
I took on the technical recovery and brought the product to working order. My task was to close the gap between the scale of the concept and what the system could actually do.
Three hard parts that a product like this stands on:
Data structure. Hundreds of thousands of entries from tens of thousands of providers must fit a clear model that can be searched and filtered.
Continuous updates. Offers change all the time, and users must see what is current.
Geography. Distances and location are calculated precisely.
A technically troubled product became a working one.
A catalogue of this scale — with constantly updated data and precise geography — started to work the way it was meant to.
Sometimes the most serious engineering work is not starting from scratch but bringing a complex system back to life and making it do what it was built for.
