Reference
Case study: Quillfeather
The fictional scaling company used as a running example throughout the learning path.
Quillfeather is fictional. It’s a composite of common scaling-company situations, invented for this learning path. Any resemblance to a real company is coincidental.
The company
Quillfeather sells B2B SaaS to independent property managers: firms that look after anything from 50 to 5,000 rental homes on behalf of landlords. The product covers tenant onboarding, rent collection, maintenance requests, and owner reporting.
| Founded | 2016 |
| People | ~650, of whom ~140 are in engineering across 18 teams |
| Customers | ~2,300 property-management firms, mostly in the UK and Ireland |
| Revenue model | Per-unit monthly subscription, plus a share of payment processing fees |
| Funding | Series C, raised last year to fund international expansion |
How it got here
- 2016–2019: A single Rails monolith built by the founding team. The CTO knew every corner of it.
- 2020: Hypergrowth during the shift to online rent payments. Teams carved services out of the monolith as fast as they could, each in their own way.
- 2022: Acquired PayNest, a payments startup, to bring rent collection in-house. PayNest kept its own stack (Go, its own customer database, its own AWS account).
- 2023: Acquired FixIt Pro, a maintenance-scheduling tool, which runs on .NET and Azure and has its own login.
- 2025: Raised a Series C on a plan to enter the Netherlands and Germany within 18 months.
Today’s symptoms
- Customer data lives in four places (core platform, PayNest, FixIt Pro, and the CRM), and they disagree.
- Three notification services send email and SMS, with different templates and opt-out handling.
- Customers log in separately to the core product and FixIt Pro. Single sign-on has been “next quarter” for two years.
- EU expansion raises questions nobody can answer quickly: Where is tenant data stored? What changes for GDPR, local payment methods, and data residency?
- Cloud spend is spread across two AWS accounts and one Azure subscription and has grown 70% in a year.
- The board wants a credible technology plan for the expansion before releasing the next tranche of budget.
People you’ll meet
| Role | What they care about |
|---|---|
| CEO | Hitting the expansion timeline; the board’s confidence |
| CTO (your manager) | Engineering velocity, platform stability, not becoming the bottleneck |
| CPO | Feature parity in the new markets; customer experience across products |
| CFO | Cloud and SaaS spend; a defensible business case for each investment |
| Head of Payments (ex-PayNest founder) | Keeping PayNest’s autonomy and speed |
| Head of Security & Compliance | GDPR, PCI DSS, the upcoming SOC 2 audit |
| Engineering managers and tech leads | Their team’s roadmap; not being slowed down by “architecture” |
Your role
You’ve been an engineering manager at Quillfeather for three years, running two of the core platform teams. The CTO has asked you to become Quillfeather’s first enterprise architect, reporting directly to them. There’s no EA function, no architecture repository, and no review board. There are a lot of opinions, a few strong senior engineers, and an expansion deadline.
Each module returns to Quillfeather to show how its ideas apply in practice.