How we’re accelerating the public rollout

In the past few weeks, you’ll have seen quite a few exciting stories on the blog about the team using and testing the app.

It’s pretty awesome to be investing on Freetrade, but we’re very conscious that our community are still waiting. So today, we want to talk about our product velocity and admit a hard truth.

Hands up, we haven’t shipped the product as fast as we (or you) would like. That needs to change.

We know everyone’s hyped to get the app, especially now it’s live in the hands of the Freetrade team.

We’ve already come a long way. Our stockbroking and backend operation are firing exactly as we want. However, there are still small but significant additions we need to make to the app before we’re comfortable bringing all of you on board.

This means making sure that issue monitoring, logging and resolution are strong, as well as covering possible edge cases (unlikely but possible scenarios) in the app. We also want to set ourselves up to improve quickly and constantly once we are live.

This has partly been down to the size of our team. In 2017 and early 2018, we were running as an ultra-lean team, engineering included. That’s changing rapidly.

This is how we’re going to accelerate things from here.

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Building a product-first engineering culture

We know we’ve got to refit our engineering culture. We have to ship products at pace and scale.

As part of that, we’re excited to announce the arrival of our new Head of Engineering, Ian Fuller. Effective immediately, he leads all aspects of Freetrade’s technology.

Ian joins us from tech giant Snap Inc, and comes with a wealth of diverse engineering experience from huge companies like Amazon to nimble startups.

Most importantly, he’s been responsible for bringing a steady stream of products and features to millions of users. That’s exactly the ethos we want at Freetrade.

His engineering approach is all about streamlining the stack to deliver strong, elegant products — and then shipping them fast. In his words, “We need everyone to live and breathe product”.

We’ll have a full interview with Ian in the next couple of weeks, with more on his plans for engineering.

In line with Ian’s arrival, we’re growing our team to 10 full-time engineers in the coming months.

We’ve got some very exciting hires coming on this front. We can’t publicly reveal the details just yet, but watch this space!

In this refit process, we’ve also parted ways with former CTO André.

The bottom line

We have to move faster and we will.

We’re putting intense effort into refining the product for full launch as soon as we can. With Ian on board, we’ll release a timeline within the next few weeks.

Most importantly we’re reshaping our engineering to deliver the product growth and speed we need for the future.

That’s what we owe to all of you, and that’s what we will deliver!

~ Adam, CEO

We’re on a mission to bring fee-free investing to Europe and beyond. 🔥

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