A membership organization serving 2,000 busy CEOs and business leaders needed to transition their mission-critical mobile and web app to a new development agency without disrupting service.
🔎 Overview
During onboarding as Product Manager, I audited the existing development contract and discovered a structural misalignment: the agency’s SaaS-style pricing ($X per user) created perverse incentives that ran counter to our organizational goal of membership growth. Every new member increased our technology costs. Combined with the need to evolve the product in a new strategic direction, we determined a vendor transition was necessary.
The app was originally built as a pandemic response and had evolved organically over time. It was now core infrastructure for our business— managing peer group meetings, attendance, scheduling, and exclusive member content access. Any downtime would be unacceptable.
📋 Approach
Evaluation & Selection
Rather than a lengthy RFP process, I identified an agency already building complementary tools for the organization. Consolidating development efforts would reduce coordination overhead and align incentives.
Transition Strategy
I designed a three-phase approach:
- Internal Knowledge Capture (1 month): I documented the app infrastructure, created journey maps, and established a knowledge base—working around operational logistics with executives who had signed the original contract.
- Structured Handoff (2 months): Collected key deliverables covering tech stack, codebase, deployment pipeline, and DevOps while maintaining parallel development.
- Hard Cutover: Executed the transition with zero production incidents.
Risk Mitigation
The primary risk was downtime to a system critical for daily operations. I established clear acceptance criteria, coordinated parallel testing environments, and maintained continuous communication between both agencies and internal stakeholders to surface issues early.
📊 Results
- $190K annual cost savings from optimized pricing structure aligned with business goals
- Zero production incidents during transition
- Maintained sprint velocity throughout handoff period
- Consolidated vendor relationships, reducing coordination overhead and improving product coherence
- Positioned the product for strategic evolution with agency better suited to our roadmap
The transition demonstrated that thoughtful planning, clear documentation, and stakeholder alignment can de-risk even the most critical vendor changes.