Overview
flytedesk helps brands, agencies, and causes reach college students at scale through multichannel advertising on and around campus. Its platform lets advertisers plan, buy, and run campaigns across more than 2,300 campuses, bringing ad inventory, orders, and delivery tracking together in one place. The platform also has to work with formats, rates, and policies that differ from one campus to the next.
flytedesk builds its own software. It has its own developers, product managers, and technical lead. It didn’t want a partner to take the work over. It wanted senior judgment at the moments when a wrong call would be expensive, and capacity that could flex with a business that runs on a seasonal calendar.
The Challenge
In spring 2022, flytedesk was ready to build the next generation of its platform. The current system, already its third version and built on Laravel (PHP), had carried the business this far. The team weighed keeping the current stack and adding testing against moving to a new stack and building the system they wanted from the ground up. They chose to build new on Ruby on Rails as a modular monolith, developed by a team that practiced test-driven development.
A platform rebuild is a decision a software company lives with for years. flytedesk wanted to get the foundation right, and to get there without a big-bang rewrite. The new system had to grow alongside the current one, with both running for a period of time, and the work had to fit around the business’s seasonal surges.
As the platform took shape, the need widened to design. flytedesk wanted a product that made sense for every role that uses it, and designs ready to build by the time they reached developers. The work called for senior design judgment, not necessarily a full-time hire.
Shaping What Gets Built
The partnership began with a one-week, on-site architecture working session. flytedesk’s developers and RoleModel started with the data model for ad inventory, the core of the platform, and shaped it to stay flexible as the business changed. Just as important was finding the right seams in the code, so new capabilities could grow out of the platform later without reworking what was already there. And rather than design everything up front, the team focused on one full vertical slice for digital media, a first version flytedesk could put to use.
Then flytedesk’s developers built it. RoleModel stayed on as an ongoing consulting partner. As working software came together, the two teams used what it showed them to shape the approach and make the key decisions, from where the design held up to where it needed to change. In those early months, the value was less about writing code and more about shaping what got written.
Shaped Around the Team
flytedesk chose to bring in senior design leadership in fractional form rather than hire for it full time. RoleModel designers joined flytedesk’s weekly design syncs and worked alongside their product owners to shape the interface. Together, they built a design system based on Optics, RoleModel’s design system, and kept it in sync with flytedesk’s Figma files. flytedesk’s product managers grew their own skills with the design tools along the way, and the shared components have since been consolidated into a platform UI package flytedesk owns.
The partnership flexes with the business. Some seasons it is architecture review on call and design at a steady weekly rhythm. Other seasons call for more. Once the new platform was running, some functions still depended on the previous system. A RoleModel team joined flytedesk’s developers for a few months, starting with time on site, to migrate key business processes. More recently, design stepped up for several weeks to shape how flytedesk pays the student media outlets that run each campaign. Each time, the work stepped back down to its regular rhythm.
Context That Carries Over
Flexible support only works if each stretch of work starts where the last one left off. Four years in, every ramp-up begins from a shared understanding of flytedesk’s business, its seasons, and the decisions behind its platform, not from zero.
flytedesk’s goal from the start has been to grow its own team and own its technology. The partnership exists to make that team stronger, not to stand in for it.
RoleModel Software is fully agile. Given the focus on delivering early and often, delivering in the smallest useful increment possible, and other agile concepts, we've never had a concern about time or timeliness. Working with them has always felt like making progress.
Karl Hofmann
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