Migration to Jamstack: A Case Study of Mambu

At the beginning of 2019, Mambu, a technology company that enhances fintech, banking, and lending businesses with a cloud-based accounting platform, contacted us to migrate their marketing website to Jamstack. They wanted the latest stack and did not compromise on performance and security.

Building websites for large organizations can be challenging. While there are issues related to the choice of technology stack, there is also the separate challenge of collaborating with various stakeholders and meeting their expectations.

With 300 employees and 9 offices around the world, Mambu's business scale is truly global. We knew that we had to approach their demands in a different way.

Mambu from a Numerical Perspective

20M

End Customer

6000+

Products

99.99%

Effectiveness

1. Customer

Mambu was migrating the company's website from HubSpot CMS. They wanted to use a more performant and reliable stack that would not only improve the visual aspects but also enable global scaling while ensuring marketing consistency. For a company providing services to financial institutions, it was crucial to ensure that the new website was as secure and fast as possible.

The Mambu team was already familiar with Jamstack, so they quickly decided to use the Gatsby, Sanity, and Netlify stack. There are several reasons for this.

The tools selected for the project are well-known for their reliability, safety, and future potential. Moreover, we were able to guarantee their performance as they were tools we had previously used while working with other clients.

As developers using best-in-class tools, we already know that these tools can move much faster in production environments. Agility is one of Mambu's core philosophies, and being able to get started quickly is a significant advantage for us as well.

Mambu's legacy website was slow, overly complex, and lacked structured data, making it difficult to navigate. They wanted to change that by introducing a new design while simplifying workflows across various teams and maintaining best practices.

2. How do Jamstack and Gatsby benefit large organizations?

Jamstack and Gatsby are excellent architectural choices that go beyond high performance. Since React is the foundation of Gatsby, it allows for easy retrieval and combination of data from various sources, making it simple to create the more dynamic parts of a site.

Mambu had already established a structure. Various teams within the company were operating using different tools, so it was necessary to integrate these services on the website. For example, the HR team needed to continue using Lever for job postings, the marketing team needed to continue receiving leads through HubSpot, and the customer success team needed to be able to access customer data via the portal app.

Fortunately, Gatsby has a rich plugin ecosystem that makes integration easy, allowing teams to continue using their preferred services.

The most important thing is that Jamstack has helped us launch and execute things quickly, providing plenty of room to implement new ideas. By using established tools like Gatsby within the stack, we were able to achieve the best possible results without spending time on redevelopment.

3. Manage content with Sanity

The headless CMS chosen by Mambu was perfect for their use case. Sanity can integrate very well with Gatsby. Not only could they quickly retrieve data from the API, but they were also able to create a real-time preview for content editors.

Mambu seeks flexibility, and has been able to build that capability with Sanity. Moving away from traditional CMS can also lead to improvements in security and performance.

However, the most important thing is that Sanity's block content allows editors to create embeddable blocks that can be dropped into rich text fields, enabling them to flexibly build complex page layouts. This facilitates the creation of a design system that makes it easier for editors and designers to collaborate in Sanity.

4. CI / CD processed by Netlify

Netlify creates a build and deployment platform in the stack.

The platform integrates seamlessly with Gatsby, requiring little to no configuration and is fully managed. This means that even if the application server crashes at midnight, you won't have to wake up an engineer.

Netlify's uptime is unparalleled. During the year we have worked with Mambu, their site has never been unavailable for even a moment.

For us as a development team, working with Netlify has continuously provided a great experience not only with basic features but also with more advanced functionalities such as serverless features.

5. Some Technologies

So, what makes working with Mambu different for us from a technical perspective?

Perhaps the most notable change for us is the use of TypeScript instead of JavaScript. In the long run, the biggest advantage of using TypeScript is that implementing new features and screens based on old components and logic becomes much easier. TypeScript adds value as it really helps maintain the codebase better and reduces the time needed to onboard other developers to the project.

From the perspective of maintaining quality and consistency, we have utilized various linters, unit tests, and end-to-end tests. We found it very helpful in maintaining the codebase as we were able to quickly identify potential issues.

6. How does working in a large corporation differ from working in a small or medium-sized enterprise?

Collaborating with large corporations involves various stakeholders in the process. As a development team, we needed to incorporate their unique preferences and opinions into the final product.

With this in mind, it was most important that our communication process was perfect. We communicated as clearly and proactively as possible to convey that what we built for them was the best it could be.

Our partnership with Bejamas, with whom we have collaborated intensively on multiple projects, has been very impressive as we have gained professional and productive experience. The Bejamas team is highly responsive, full of ideas, and always committed. We strongly recommend Bejamas as the best partner for modern web development projects, including Jamstack and React.

 

Eppo Heemstra
Marketing Operations Manager at Mambu

Jamstack may seem like a fairly fresh approach, but it is outstanding in terms of reliability. I believe this is the most important expectation when working with large organizations.

Using Jamstack does not mean that the final product is boring just because it is secure. It provides plenty of space to implement even the most complex ideas.