Liran Keren (now VP Engineering) joined Behalf as one of the first developers in the company. For the first couple of months, Behalf managed all their customers’ financing through Excel; but as their business scaled, they realized that their merchants and business customers needed a more advanced product. “I was part of the beginning of the platform,” says Liran. “It’s been a journey.”
The engineers began to develop a platform using simple task management tools, then moved to Jira as their development lifecycle became more complex.
The switch presented new challenges for engineering managers and team leaders. “It was very hard to do any long planning or even go a level up and see an overview of what was happening,” says Liran.
As a workaround, Behalf’s Product Team built and managed their roadmap on a separate platform. That led to a lack of visibility between the Engineering Team and product managers and hours wasted in meetings every week.
Liran noticed this pain immediately when he became VP Engineering. “A minute after the status meeting, I didn’t know what was going on,” he says, “and it was during a Covid lockdown, so everyone was at home and I couldn’t ask anyone in the corridor.”
Soon, Liran also became frustrated trying to customize his team’s workflows on Jira. ”I want this tool to work for me. I don’t want to work for the tool. Changing something could have taken me, like, two days, and I’m a decent developer,” Liran laughs.