“Pivot as a lifecycle platform hit the mark with some of the world's biggest companies. We’re full speed ahead with our roadmap, and the future looks very bright. The partnership, commitment, and skill of the Softjourn team enabled us to navigate this product transformation effectively.”
Pivot: Enabling Faster Feature Delivery Through Platform Modernization
Driving engineering efficiency with multi-environment development and a redesigned architecture.
ABOUT THE CLIENT:
Project:Multi-Environment Architecture Modernization
Industry:Technology Services
Client since:2023
Headquarters:Toronto, Canada
The Challenge
As Pivot scaled, its engineering team was constrained by a single shared environment and an increasingly complex architecture. Testing conflicts, manual deployments, and growing maintenance overhead slowed feature delivery and increased release risk.
The Solution
Softjourn re-architected the platform with a dynamic multi-environment setup, a more maintainable modular architecture, and automated CI/CD pipelines. This enabled parallel development and testing, faster releases, and a stronger foundation for long-term scalability.
The Benefits
- Faster, parallel feature delivery
- Isolated, production-like QA environments
- More predictable, automated releases
- Easier maintenance and lower technical debt
Introduction
Pivot is a Canadian-based platform designed to help organizations proactively manage large-scale audio-visual (AV) systems and devices across multiple locations.
By centralizing AV asset management and monitoring into a single platform, Pivot enables enterprises to track device health, configure room setups, and deliver seamless collaboration experiences for end users.
As Pivot’s user base grew, so did the complexity of its platform. With only one shared development environment, the engineering team faced testing conflicts, delayed deployments, and slower delivery of new features.
At the same time, Pivot’s original architecture, while functional, became harder to maintain and evolve as complexity increased.
To support ongoing growth, Pivot needed a stronger technical foundation; one that would streamline development, enable parallel feature work, and improve maintainability over time.
Softjourn partnered with Pivot to re-architect the platform, introduce a dynamic multi-environment setup, and automate deployments, setting the stage for faster delivery, parallel testing, and more predictable releases.
Eric Rauch, Co-Founder of Pivot
The Challenge
Pivot’s engineering team was under pressure to deliver new features quickly while maintaining platform stability. However, the original single-environment setup made this increasingly difficult:
- Shared Environment Bottlenecks
Developers, QA engineers, and operations teams all worked in the same environment, leading to testing conflicts, unexpected regressions, and slowed delivery when multiple features were under development. - Slow Testing & Delivery
Releases required significant manual effort, adding time and introducing risks into the deployment QA processes. - Difficult Maintenance
The original architecture relied on hundreds of independent functions and loosely connected services, making updates, debugging, and feature additions harder to manage.
Pivot needed a modernized engineering approach that would enable parallel feature development, speed up testing, and improve the maintainability of the platform.
The Solution
Softjourn collaborated closely with Pivot’s engineering team to modernize its infrastructure and development workflows. The solution focused on three core areas:
1. Multi-Environment Development
Pivot V1 relied on a single environment for both development and testing, which created conflicts and slowed delivery. Softjourn implemented a dynamic multi-environment setup that allowed teams to spin up and tear down environments on demand.
Key improvements to Pivot V2 included:
- Spin up multiple environments to support parallel development.
- Enable QA teams to validate features in isolated, production-like environments without conflicts.
- Deliver customer demos or proofs of concept in dedicated environments without impacting production.
This flexibility removed bottlenecks, allowing Pivot’s engineering team to work in parallel and deliver features faster.
2. New Architecture for Maintainability
To prepare Pivot for long-term growth, Softjourn re-architected the platform to make it easier to manage, debug, and evolve. Key improvements included:
- Migrating from JavaScript to TypeScript for better error handling and stability.
- Modernizing the platform architecture to improve maintainability and delivery speed.
- Introducing a modular architecture to make enhancements and maintenance more efficient.
This foundation reduced technical debt and positioned Pivot for faster delivery of new features.
These architectural updates established a stronger, cleaner foundation for future feature development.
3. Automated Deployments
To further accelerate releases, Softjourn implemented a new CI/CD pipeline, automating previously manual deployment steps:
- Standardizing the release process across environments.
- Reducing deployment time and human error risks.
- Allowing developers to focus on innovation rather than repetitive operational tasks.
With automated pipelines in place, Pivot’s teams now release features faster, more reliably, and with fewer interruptions.
The Benefits
By modernizing Pivot’s engineering workflows and introducing a flexible multi-environment setup, Softjourn helped the team deliver features faster and with greater reliability.
Development and QA now work in parallel without stepping on each other’s work, and deployments have become more predictable and less error-prone.
Key outcomes include:
- Accelerated Development Cycles: Multiple environments allow engineers to build and test features simultaneously, significantly reducing delivery timelines.
- Improved QA Efficiency: QA teams now validate features in isolated, production-like environments, speeding up testing and reducing conflicts.
- More Predictable Releases: With a standardized CI/CD pipeline, deployments are faster, more consistent, and require less manual intervention.
- Stronger Platform Maintainability: By migrating from hundreds of fragmented Lambda functions to a unified API service and adopting TypeScript, the platform became easier to manage, debug, and evolve.
- Future-Ready Foundation: Pivot now has the infrastructure to handle growing demands and deliver enhancements faster than ever.
Conclusion
Pivot’s rapid growth required an engineering foundation that could support faster delivery without sacrificing stability. By introducing multi-environment development, automated deployments, and a redesigned architecture, Softjourn gave Pivot’s engineering team the flexibility and reliability they needed to accelerate their roadmap.
These improvements laid the groundwork for future innovation and helped Pivot confidently expand its capabilities.
Eric Rauch, Pivot’s Co-Founder, shared: “Pivot as a lifecycle platform hit the mark with some of the world's biggest companies. We’re full speed ahead with our roadmap, and the future looks very bright.”
Softjourn continues to collaborate closely with Pivot, supporting upcoming initiatives like AI-driven incident resolution, improved user experience, enhanced automations, and smarter integrations to help the platform evolve alongside its customers’ needs.
Looking to modernize your infrastructure or improve scalability? Let’s talk about how Softjourn can help you engineer for growth.
Partnership & Recognition
