Outdated Platform Slowing Down Go-to-Market Speed
HotSchedules is an online restaurant management platform that delivers scheduling, talent, and inventory management tools. The solution enables restaurant owners to recruit talent, develop and share training courses with staff, track business productivity, and manage day-to-day restaurant operations.
However, their platform was built on outdated technology that was unreliable and lacked the scalability needed to compete. The technological deficit created significant business challenges.
HotSchedules struggled to keep up in a rapidly growing industry due to its slow go-to-market strategy. Collaboration was strained across five global offices due to time zone gaps and disconnected workflows. Most importantly, the platform’s stability couldn’t meet the high demands of peak seasons, putting customer trust and revenue at risk.
They needed a partner who could provide a significant boost in engineering capacity and expertise to rebuild their platform for the future.
Driving a Full-Scale Modernization with 10 Scrum Teams
HotSchedules required a partner capable of rapidly augmenting their team with high-quality engineering talent to tackle complex business requirements across multiple work streams. KMS Technology was selected to serve as an extension of their team, quickly assembling a product squad of over 70 engineers and testers organized into 10 high-performing scrum teams.
1. CI/CD System
KMS immediately identified manual deployment and validation as a major pain point. Each release was fraught with delays, rollbacks, and late-night troubleshooting. By implementing a CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) system, we automated build, testing, and deployment across feature branches and environments.
The shift transformed the release cycle from weeks into days, allowing teams to confidently ship high-quality updates at the pace demanded by a global user base. As a result, new features were deployed quickly, with minimal disruption to ongoing operations.
2. New Microservices Architecture
Our team led the re-architecture of HotSchedules’s legacy system to a modular microservices-based platform, enabling each scrum team to develop, test, and deploy their own components independently.
The new microservices architecture not only solved legacy bottlenecks, but also made it easier to onboard international customers and support high-traffic events, which are key to HotSchedules’s rapid market expansion.
3. QA & Testing
HotSchedules was previously hindered by firefighting production defects and overloaded QA resources. To resolve this issue, KMS embedded automation-first quality assurance into every Scrum team.
A higher-quality QA process enabled faster iterations without compromising stability. Importantly, it led to the milestone of zero critical defects being released to production, even during market surges, ensuring a seamless customer experience.
4. Scalable Platform
Beyond technology upgrades, we engineered the platform to support mission-critical restaurant workflows: demand forecasting, production reporting, cash management, and real-time inventory tracking. Our scalable architecture allowed HotSchedules to seamlessly onboard large enterprise chains and expand toolsets to meet the evolving needs of operators worldwide.
The platform played a decisive role in their successful acquisition by Marlin Equity Partners in July 2019.
Achieving Global Scale and a Successful Acquisition
The strategic partnership with KMS armed HotSchedules with the engineering velocity and technical excellence required to transform their platform and capture market leadership. By seamlessly integrating 10 scrum teams into their operations, we eliminated development bottlenecks and delivered a modern, scalable, and reliable platform.
The new architecture powered the platform’s expansion to support over 2 million users in 26 countries. The commitment to quality led to zero critical defects being released, building customer trust and ensuring stability during peak demand.
“KMS was committed to our success and we would not have come close to accomplishing what we did without their partnership.”
The successful modernization not only solidified HotSchedules’ position as an industry leader but also was a key factor in their successful acquisition. KMS provided the dedicated product squad to turn ambitious goals into reality.