Company structure and product management
The tight-knit team of 20 employees at Blaze Portfolio is involved in almost all stages of the development process. Bryson employs front- and back-end developers, a QA team, a project manager, and a system architect. Blaze Portfolio’s support team is responsible for writing up and sometimes identifying bug fixes. They also test all the new releases and fixes, notifying clients that have reported or encountered issues. The system architect is responsible for overseeing the bigger initiatives, while the project manager manages day-to-day tasks and goals.
“We use an agile approach and have two-week sprints. Before our product manager came on about two years ago, our management approach was a little less organized than it is now. But now we’re a big fan of all the Atlassian products, and we use JIRA to manage all of our sprints.”
Unlike its competitors, Blaze Portfolio releases updates every six weeks. This fast and frequent rollout is a way to ensure that inherent risks, such as security issues, are mitigated quickly. Security issues are prioritized above all.
Blaze Portfolio is passionate about user experience. Their motto is the more intuitive the platform, the fewer support calls there will be. Bryson says this came from his dad, an architect, who was always very focused on design.
“I think another thing that sets us apart, and one of my personal mantras, is [that we strive] to improve the user experience, because it helps with onboarding and the adoption of the product, and it reduces our [need to provide] support. We include unlimited support for our product with our subscription so people can call whenever they like.”
Combining tech and business knowledge
It’s important for software developers to understand how to implement things from a tech point of view, and just as important for them to see how this is applied in the respective business domain. Bryson personally developed training materials that he uses with his developers. With his strong finance background of over 20 years he can distill the most pertinent information so that developers can understand the industry better.
“There are a lot of very subtle things, or things that you need to think about in advance as you’re building software for the industry, because, especially around financial products, there is a specific way they are reported and accounted for.”
Additionally, developers need to have an understanding of the institutions that make up the industry, such as custodians, brokers, and settlement experts.
A good example of the benefits of reengineering
Blaze Portfolio recently rebuilt their entire backend. The main reason Bryson and team went the route of reengineering is fairly simple—they needed the capability to process mountains of data for a real-time experience. Bryson said that these issues with scaling weren’t taken into account from the beginning. Now, the platform fully utilizes asynchronous processing, which allows it to process large amounts of data.
“We wanted to make it so you can process things overnight, or for things that were done the previous day, or that day, but basically if you need information in real-time, then that should be something that you have readily available.”