137% Engineering Velocity: How I Transformed Delivery at an HR Fintech

The Problem

Hastee was an earned wage access platform that let employees withdraw a portion of their salary before payday. The product served enterprise clients across the UK and Europe, integrating directly with payroll and ERP systems. The engineering organization had grown to 13 engineers split across 3 teams, but output was not scaling with headcount.

Delivery was unpredictable. Priorities shifted frequently without a clear framework, engineers were pulled in multiple directions, and there was a disconnect between what leadership needed and what teams were building. Sprint commitments were missed regularly, and the backlog had become a graveyard of half-finished features. The company needed a systematic approach to align engineering capacity with business goals.

The Solution

As Tech PM, I took ownership of the entire delivery pipeline. The first step was establishing a prioritization framework that connected C-level strategic objectives to individual team backlogs. Every feature, bug fix, and technical debt item was scored against business impact and effort, creating a transparent system that leadership and engineers could both trust.

I restructured how the three teams operated. Each team got a clear domain and well-defined ownership boundaries. Cross-team dependencies were mapped and managed through structured coordination rituals rather than ad-hoc Slack messages. I introduced capacity planning that accounted for integration work, which was critical given the complexity of connecting with multiple European ERP systems like SAP, Sage, and others.

The ERP integration challenge was particularly demanding. Each client used a different payroll provider with unique data formats and authentication methods. I worked closely with engineering leads to create a standardized integration layer that reduced the effort of onboarding new ERP connections from weeks to days.

The Impact

Within the first year, engineering velocity increased by 137% as measured by throughput of shipped features and completed story points per sprint. The improvement came not from working harder but from eliminating waste: fewer context switches, clearer priorities, and less rework from misaligned requirements.

The prioritization framework I implemented became the standard operating model for product-engineering collaboration. C-level stakeholders gained visibility into what was being built and why, which reduced the friction of constant reprioritization requests. Over my 1.5 years at Hastee, the team successfully shipped integrations with multiple EU ERP systems, expanding the platform's addressable market significantly.

The experience reinforced a core belief: engineering performance is rarely a talent problem. It is almost always a systems problem. Fix the system, and the people deliver.