Driven by an engaged customer base and frequent high-profile sales, a health and wellness e-commerce company is riding a wave of momentum.
But for years behind the scenes, mounting tech debt and software lifecycle inefficiencies had stalled platform growth and slowed time-to-market. Read on to see how GuideIT helped the retailer retake control and reduce costs.
The Challenge
- A lack of scalability meant the team had no room to solve problems on the fly. Lengthy outages — often triggered by predictable traffic surges — were the norm. Unpatched systems and deferred maintenance left an engineering team of more than 20 constantly bogged down by routine operational tasks that pulled focus from innovation and feature delivery.
- A complex environment filled with legacy tools only added to the challenge over time. Experimental or outdated solutions became ever more difficult to manage, and the company was spending on unused or inefficient services.
The Solution:
More Stability, Smoother Operations, and Reduced Spending
GuideIT proposed a Developer Enablement partnership to enhance the existing engineering team’s capabilities and bring structure to a chaotic, high-pressure environment. The goal was threefold:
To further improve resilience and efficiency, large portions of the environment were migrated to managed services. GuideIT now helps manage these systems alongside the client’s internal engineering team. The shift enabled:
- High availability and streamlined scaling, with simplified pricing schemes from associated services
- Automated patching and reduced maintenance overhead
- Elimination of unused or experimental features that had racked up costs
With the environment stabilized and the engineering team no longer bogged down by operational firefighting, GuideIT stepped into an ongoing advisory role to serve as a strategic partner — helping the client whiteboard new initiatives, identify scalability concerns before they arise, and handle the day-to-day tasks that keep systems secure and teams productive. Rather than replace talent, GuideIT augments it and continues to provide:
- Architecture advisory and implementation planning
- Proactive performance and scalability tuning
- Full operational support to free up internal teams
The Result:
Newfound Efficiencies and Time to Innovate
By partnering with GuideIT, the health and wellness retailer was finally able to eliminate persistent issues that had stretched its dev team to the brink — all while reducing technical debt.
Where outages had once been a weekly occurrence, uptime is now the standard. GuideIT remedied the downtime-heavy environment to reduce the number of outages to just one within the first several months of working together. Since then, the platform has experienced only one additional outage — a dramatic shift that has reset internal expectations around platform stability.
Cost efficiency improved as well. By removing unused experimental tools and optimizing services across the environment, GuideIT reduced operating costs by approximately 30%. Those savings were reinvested into initiatives that deliver business value, enabling the company to grow without increasing spend.
Today, GuideIT proactively manages day-to-day support, freeing internal developers to focus on high-impact product work. When new initiatives emerge, GuideIT’s Developer Enablement experts act as strategic partners — offering architecture guidance, scalability planning, and operational support.