How diversity and complexity at CobbleWeb drive career growth

We’ve all been there: starting a new job filled with excitement about exploring new career horizons. Too often though, that excitement gets crushed by the daily boredom of assembly-line type work. There’s nothing worse than feeling that your career and skill set are not progressing.

At CobbleWeb though, growth is not optional; it is baked into our company DNA. Here are three good reasons why you will always experience professional (and perhaps even personal) growth as a member of our team.

Project diversity

The clue is in our tagline – ‘Custom Marketplace Solutions’. 

We conceptualise, design, build, and improve high-performance marketplace platforms that are unique, scalable and delight millions of users, who in turn generate millions of pounds in monthly revenue. Check out our portfolio for some interesting examples!

Our projects include all types of marketplaces (B2B, B2C, P2P) at various stages of evolution. Examples range from multinationals like Atos (project management dashboard for a public sector service marketplace), established platforms like FanPass (marketplace for buying and selling event tickets) and MobyPark (parking space app), to up-and-coming startups such as Nestify (property management app) and SoShop (neobank that offers reward programs).

Tech diversity and complexity

Firstly, it is important to understand that CobbleWeb is not an outsourcing company. We also don’t use one-size-fits-all off-the-shelf templates like Shopify. Instead, we work closely with our clients to design custom marketplaces from scratch. 

Regular investments in product development research ensure that we stay ahead of the game. Recent examples include:

• How to leverage AI to improve the search engine features of product and service marketplaces.

• An AI solution that generates synthetic data, which is used to mimic production data in staging environments. This allows us to test features in close to real-world conditions.

• After we noticed that checkouts tend to be very API intensive we investigated GraphQL, which is now being used on a regular basis.

We carefully research, evaluate, and implement the most suitable tech stack for each new client. Our product-led focus relies on in-depth discoveries to select the technology that best serves each project’s business goals. This includes making sure that the tech stack provides a seamless user experience.

This means we often have to solve complex challenges. For example, MobyPark, a parking-space app, had to accommodate diverse user scenarios and user journeys, which forced us to create a balance between simplicity, rich features and speed.

• We solved the challenge by building an advanced search feature which allows drivers to search car parks based on facilities, booking period and location. In addition, these search preferences automatically update the fee calculation.
• Google Autocomplete with custom filters was incorporated into the search feature to assist drivers with finding the nearest or cheapest parking bays. Given that the shortest booking period is 15 minutes, we had to use a robust infrastructure, built with Elastic search, RabbitMQ and AngularJS, to make sure it’s scalable.
• The new search feature saw search failures slashed by 80%, which contributed to a tenfold increase in revenue.

Team diversity

CobbleWeb’s remote-work model focuses on only recruiting the best possible candidates. So you can prepare yourself for a multicultural environment that supports the sharing of diverse opinions and insights. 

We believe this diversity offers great potential for professional growth when it is properly leveraged as a cohesive unit. Product discovery and solution optimisation are thus seen as a team effort, underpinned by a culture of constructive feedback and mutual support.

On a practical level this means that we do not work in silos. Cross-functional collaboration is an important part of our value proposition. It is key to unlocking project challenges and drives productivity as well as innovation. Designers, front-end engineers, back-end engineers all have a say in the solutions we choose and implement.

Good team fit is therefore a prerequisite in our recruitment process. Not only from a company perspective, but also to make sure that team members enjoy working closely together.

The high calibre of CobbleWeb’s team is reflected in the fact that we only hire one engineer out of every 4,000 – 5,000 applicants.