A fitness revolution takes shape
OVERVIEW
Beachbody required an athletic response to a tired technology platform. We raced to build powerful applications, helping our client, their coaches, and customers perform at a higher level.
Scope
Product Engineering, Cloud Enablement, Experience Design, DevOps, Data Pipeline Optimization, Front-End Development
Technology
AWS, Docker, Puppet, Splunk, Alert Logic, Artifactory, AppDynamics
Coaching for the coaches
Beachbody – the multilevel marketing company that sells fitness, weight-loss, and muscle-building products to over 23 million customers – was struggling with its 12-year-old online selling platform, Coach Online Office (COO). Together, we rebuilt the COO from the ground up – transforming it into an efficient, highly scalable, mobile-friendly platform. Beachbody’s thousands of coaches can now quickly react to customers’ demands, plan for the future, and make more sales.
“We’ve been able to show our stakeholders that there’s a better way to build systems.”
— Eduardo Frias, Chief Information Officer
Strength and flexibility are key
Beachbody’s independent coaches are the lifeblood of the business, and the Coach Online Office (COO) is their virtual headquarters. Coaches rely on the COO to track orders, customers, and sales data, but the platform – which was built and hosted by a third party outside of Beachbody’s control – had serious performance, data integrity, and stability issues. During weekly bonus runs – when Beachbody coaches check to see if they’ve met their targets – significant slowdowns or delays were common. When that happened, coaches flocked to social media and the company to complain. It was a serious threat to the Beachbody brand and its relationship with its beloved coaches.
Working toward peak performance
After an intensive discovery process, a combined Slalom and Beachbody team created the requirements, built the backlog, and delivered the foundational architecture of the Coach Office’s ETL ingest, service layer, and CMS capable front end.
The mobile-optimized application was built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing a key advantage for peak use times (the weekly bonus runs) which ensured easy scaling as Beachbody’s coach network continued to grow.
The front end of the new mobile COO is built on a flexible CMS, so editorial and design changes can be made quickly and easily. The back end is a sophisticated data pipeline that processes multiple data streams in milliseconds. Slalom engineers partnered with the owners of the various data sources to show them how to reduce errors and formatting conflicts, and wrote a new, high-performance ingest engine. Overall average process times are now 96 percent faster.
Beachbody coaches overwhelming embraced the new application, with comments on Usabilla and Facebook ranging from “This is fantastic!” to “My life is complete!” Within 30 days, 76 percent of active coaches had adopted the mobile platform, and daily usage had leveled out around five times higher than on the old platform—a massive increase in engagement.