Migration to Jamstack: Mambu Case Study

In early 2019, Mambu, a technology company that specializes in fintech, banking, and lending businesses on a cloud-based accounting platform, contacted us to migrate their marketing website to Jamstack. They wanted the latest stack and were not willing to compromise on performance and security.

Building a large-scale website for an organization can be challenging. There is also the issue of selecting the right technology stack, as well as the 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 we had to approach their requests in a different way.

Mambu from Numbers

20M

End Customer

6000+

Product

99.99%

Effectiveness

1. Customer

Mambu has moved the company's website from HubSpotCMS. They wanted to use a more high-performance and reliable stack that would not only improve the visual aspects, but also enable global scaling while ensuring marketing consistency. For companies that provide 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 high reliability, safety, and future potential. In addition, since they were previously used with other clients, we can guarantee their performance.

For us, as developers who use the best tools in the class, we already know that these tools can move much faster in production environments. Agility is one of the core philosophies of Mambu, and being able to start quickly is a big advantage for us.

Mambu's legacy website was slow, overly complex, and lacked structured data, making it difficult to navigate. They decided to make changes and introduce a new design, while also simplifying workflows for various teams and maintaining best practices.

2. How can Jamstack and Gatsby benefit large organizations?

Jamstack and Gatsby are excellent architecture options that go beyond high performance. Since React is the foundation of Gatsby, it allows for easy creation of more dynamic parts of the site by retrieving and combining data from various sources.

Mambu had already established its structure. As various teams within the company were operating with different tools, it was necessary to integrate these services on the website. For example, the HR team could continue to use Lever for job postings, the marketing team could continue to receive leads through HubSpot, and the customer success team needed access to customer data through the portal app.

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

The most important thing is that Jamstack has helped us to quickly launch and execute things, giving us plenty of room to implement new ideas. By using established tools like Gatsby and others in 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 can it quickly retrieve data from the API, but it can also create real-time previews for content editors.

Mambu is looking for flexibility and was able to achieve it through building with Sanity. Moving away from traditional CMS can also improve security and performance.

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

4. CI/CD processed by Netlify

At Stack, Netlify creates a build and deployment platform.

The platform is seamlessly integrated with Gatsby, requiring minimal configuration and fully managed. This means that even if the application server crashes in the middle of the night, there is no need to wake up the engineer.

Netlify's uptime is unparalleled. In the year that we have been working with Mambu, there has not been a single moment where Mambu's site was unavailable.

For our development team, working with Netlify has been a great experience, not only with basic functionality but also with more advanced features such as serverless capabilities.

5. Some Technologies

So, what sets working with Mambu apart from others 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 has proven to be valuable in maintaining our codebase properly and shortening the time it takes to onboard other developers to the project.

From the perspective of maintaining quality and consistency, we have used various linters, unit tests, and end-to-end tests. We have found that this is extremely helpful in quickly identifying potential issues and maintaining our code base.

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

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.

Keeping 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 as excellent as possible.

Our partnership with Bejamas, with whom we have worked intensively on multiple projects, has been very impressive as it has allowed us to gain professional and productive experience. The Bejamas team is highly responsive, full of ideas, and always committed. We highly recommend Bejamas as the best partner for the latest web development projects, including Jamstack and React.

 

Eppo Heemstra
Marketing Operations Manager at Mambu

Jamstack may seem like a fairly fresh approach, but it excels 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 will be boring, it means that it will be more secure. It provides a lot of space to implement even the most complex ideas.