In the early years, Esgian had no legacy to work around. WDF used that freedom to design a cloud‑native, service‑oriented architecture on AWS: TypeScript microservices, event‑driven data pipelines, and React frontends built for analytical workflows. The goal was to ship a credible first version quickly – without sacrificing the qualities that matter later: observability, testability, extensibility and security.

Working side‑by‑side with Esgian’s domain experts, WDF delivered the first versions of Rigs, Shipping and Wind, each with interactive analytical tools, role‑based access control and multi‑tenant isolation. Two‑week sprints with regular demos let Esgian’s leadership see progress, adjust priorities and validate assumptions directly in the running product.

Once Esgian secured funding, the company hired product managers, analysts and domain specialists. Rather than a handoff, WDF and Esgian opted for a hybrid model built around a single Jira backlog.

Esgian’s product managers created epics and user stories describing business value and domain rules. A WDF project manager and scrum master, together with the development team, translated these into a delivery plan: technical tasks, estimates and two‑week sprint planning. Everyone – WDF engineers, Esgian product owners and stakeholders – worked in the same tools: Jira for planning, Confluence for specifications and runbooks, and shared channels for day‑to‑day collaboration.

This meant product decisions stayed close to domain experts, technical decisions stayed coherent with architecture, and there was no “throwing requirements over the wall.”

As usage grew, WDF extended the platform to handle higher data volumes, more granular emissions metrics and improved query performance – all while maintaining high uptime and predictable release cadence, essential for daily decision‑making.

When Esgian was ready to build an in‑house engineering group, the priority was continuity. WDF documented architecture, patterns and operational practices in depth; structured codebases and infrastructure for discoverability; and onboarded new Esgian engineers into existing rituals.

Responsibility shifted gradually:

1. Esgian engineers paired with WDF developers on selected features
2. Over time, they took over more components and services
3. WDF moved into a mentorship and advisory role, focusing on complex changes and architecture questions
4. Eventually, Esgian’s team ran releases, operations and roadmap delivery independently

The result was a smooth transition: no major outages, no long freeze on new features, and no loss of knowledge.