7 Years of Strategic Partnership with Europe's Leading Travel Platform
How we became Kiwi.com's trusted technology partner, delivering over €24M in measurable business impact and enabling 50%+ growth through strategic product development and engineering excellence.
Overview
Since 2018, we've been embedded as Kiwi.com's strategic technology partner: not external contractors, but integrated members of their product and engineering organization. Over seven years, our engineering managers, team leads, senior engineers, UX researchers, and lead designers have delivered over €24M in measurable bottom-line impact, enabled 50%+ business growth, and shipped over 100 major initiatives. This partnership has evolved from initial trust-building engagements to full strategic collaboration where we help shape product direction, mentor internal teams, and drive their most critical initiatives. The result? A seven-year relationship built on consistent delivery, deep integration, and genuine investment in Kiwi.com's success.
Key Metrics
The Challenge
Kiwi.com's challenge was common but critical: how do you scale rapidly without breaking what's working? They needed to modernize legacy systems while shipping new features at startup velocity, support explosive traffic growth without downtime, and stay ahead of fierce competition in the European travel market. Traditional agencies delivered code but not strategic thinking. Staff augmentation provided bodies but not leadership. What Kiwi.com needed was embedded strategic partners: senior practitioners who could integrate with their teams, understand their business deeply, and contribute as true members of their organization. They needed engineering managers who could lead initiatives, team leads who could mentor their developers, and senior designers and researchers who could shape product direction, all working together as a cohesive extension of their internal organization.
Our Solution
We embedded as strategic partners from day one. Our engineering managers integrated with their leadership team to shape technical direction and drive organizational improvements. Our team leads worked directly with Kiwi.com's engineers, not just shipping code, but mentoring, establishing best practices, and elevating their entire engineering culture. Senior engineers brought deep expertise to their most complex technical challenges. Lead designers and UX researchers collaborated with product teams to validate ideas, optimize experiences, and drive measurable conversion improvements. This wasn't staff augmentation. It was true partnership. We attended their standups, participated in their planning sessions, owned outcomes alongside their internal teams, and thought strategically about their business, not just our deliverables. Over 100 initiatives and seven years later, this embedded model has proven its value: we've become the team Kiwi.com calls for their biggest bets and tightest deadlines.
The Process
Seven Years of Strategic Partnership
What began in 2018 as a focused engagement has evolved into one of the longest-running technology partnerships in the European travel industry. In the early years (2018-2019), we embedded engineering managers and senior engineers to establish trust and prove our ability to deliver on critical initiatives. As confidence grew (2020-2021), we scaled to full cross-functional teams: team leads, lead designers, UX researchers, and senior engineers working directly alongside Kiwi.com's product organization. By 2022-2023, we weren't just executing; we were shaping strategy, leading platform modernization, and mentoring their internal teams. Today, seven years later, we're not vendors or contractors. We're embedded strategic partners who Kiwi.com trusts with their most important bets. This longevity isn't luck; it's earned through consistent delivery, deep integration, and genuine investment in their success.
Modernizing Without Breaking
Legacy systems are a fact of life, but they don't have to slow you down. Our engineering managers and senior engineers led Kiwi.com's platform modernization, refactoring critical components piece by piece while keeping the business running. The payoff was massive: faster feature development, lower maintenance costs, and a platform that could scale with their ambitions. We replaced brittle legacy code with modern, maintainable architecture that their internal teams could confidently extend. This wasn't a rip-and-replace disaster; it was surgical, strategic modernization that improved the business without disrupting it.
Product Innovation That Moves Metrics
We don't build features because they sound cool. We build them because they impact the bottom line. Our lead designers and UX researchers embedded directly with Kiwi.com's product teams to identify high-impact opportunities, validate assumptions with real users, and ship features that measurably improved conversion and satisfaction. This wasn't design as decoration; it was design as strategy. Our UX researchers conducted deep user studies that uncovered friction points costing Kiwi.com revenue. Our lead designers translated those insights into solutions that moved metrics. The result was a continuous stream of validated innovations that kept Kiwi.com ahead of competitors and drove significant revenue growth. Every initiative was measured, every result documented, every win celebrated.
Engineering Excellence at Scale
Great code matters, but great processes matter more. Our engineering managers and team leads didn't just deliver features. They transformed how Kiwi.com's entire engineering organization operates. We established CI/CD pipelines that let teams ship confidently, introduced testing standards that caught bugs before users did, and ran mentorship programs that leveled up their internal engineers. Our team leads paired directly with Kiwi.com's developers, sharing knowledge and elevating their skills. Our engineering managers worked with their leadership to improve planning, reduce technical debt, and build a culture of engineering excellence. The impact was dramatic: deployment frequency increased, production incidents dropped, and developer velocity improved across the entire organization. We didn't just ship code; we made their entire engineering organization better and left them with the capabilities to sustain that excellence long-term.
Results
The numbers tell part of the story: over €24M in documented bottom-line impact, 50%+ growth enabled through technology innovation, and over 100 successful initiatives launched. But the real measure of success is longevity and trust. Seven years later, we're more deeply embedded than ever. What started as a tactical engagement has evolved into strategic partnership where our engineering managers help shape Kiwi.com's technical roadmap, our team leads mentor and elevate their engineering organization, and our senior practitioners drive their highest-priority initiatives. Our teams have contributed over 160 years of cumulative experience, and that depth shows in both the quality of our work and the trust we've earned. When Kiwi.com faces their biggest challenges or tightest deadlines, we're not just a vendor they call. We're the partners already in the room, already invested, already delivering.
Technologies
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