A custom chat library and employee management inside a live e-commerce product

An e-commerce platform for independent food distributors needed two highly requested back-office features shipped without disrupting its existing product. Creating accounts for customers’ employees, setting permissions, and linking them to entities was a manual process; and the chat that worked in the mobile app had no equivalent in the back office, because it was tied to a React Native library that could not be reused there.

A Leanware engineer embedded with the in-house team and shipped both projects. The employee management work added a new page to the back office so customers manage their own employees, permissions, and entity links. The chat work required building a custom chat and messaging React library from scratch, integrated with the client’s design system and their bespoke stack: Next.js, React, React Native, Testing Library, Apollo, GraphQL, and Hasura.

The engagement ran on scrum with week-long sprints and check-ins three times a week. Working from incomplete product descriptions, the engineer filled the gaps by asking the right questions and picked up the team’s undocumented code patterns and conventions without hand-holding.

Both projects shipped within the expected timelines, along with a series of smaller fixes and enhancements across the applications. The client’s Clutch review highlights how quickly the engineer onboarded to undocumented code, the steady on-time sprint delivery even through mid-sprint pivots, and a collaboration that felt like one team rather than a third party.

Per the confidentiality terms of the engagement, the client is identified only as an e-commerce company; the engagement value is confidential.