Executive summary
When Staffbase acquired a social media management platform built on a heavily customised and older version of .NET stack, they also inherited years of technical debt, customer-specific integrations, and a product that didn’t fit their long-term engineering direction. At the same time, the platform was actively used by high-profile enterprises.
Instead of investing in a large-scale rebuild, Staffbase chose a more practical approach: keep the platform reliable while gradually phasing it out over time.
Helmes took over the platform’s technical maintenance and day-to-day system support. Over the next three years, the team improved the environment, reduced monthly maintenance effort from roughly 700 hours to around 200, and maintained reliable service continuity throughout the transition period.
As Adrian Singer, the Engineering Lead in Staffbase put it:
Meet the customer
Staffbase is the world’s largest independent employee communications and experience platform trusted by more than 1,500 organisations worldwide — including global icons like DHL, Adidas, Toyota, Aldi, Sephora, and Bacardi.
When the world’s biggest brands need to reach their people, they turn to Staffbase.
The platform brings communication, knowledge sharing, and employee services together across every touchpoint — mobile, desktop, email, SMS, and seamless workplace integrations — with a relentless focus on connecting both distributed and frontline workforces, wherever they are.
As part of its bold growth journey, Staffbase acquired a dedicated social media management platform — the very tool that global enterprises like Mercedes-Benz, Lufthansa, and BMW rely on to orchestrate publishing, campaigns, and analytics across every major channel, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
This acquired platform became the heart of Helmes’ legacy maintenance and support engagement — where keeping powerful tools running strong is the mission.
The challenge
The platform had grown over many years in a fast-moving startup environment. Features were added quickly, integrations built up over time, and customisations introduced additional complexity.
The result was a system that still functioned but had become increasingly difficult to maintain.
Several factors made the situation especially challenging:
- The technology stack didn’t match Staffbase’s long-term engineering direction
- Enterprise customers still relied heavily on the platform
- Documentation and historical knowledge were fragmented
- Proper modernisation would have required significant reinvestment, despite the platform having a limited future lifespan
- Internal product teams were focused on strategic platform development rather than maintaining a non-core acquired system
Staffbase needed a practical way to keep the platform stable and maintain service quality without building a dedicated internal maintenance team around a product they ultimately planned to phase out.
As one Helmes team member described it:
“The goal was not to rebuild something that still worked. The goal was to keep it consistent, reduce operational pressure, and give the client space to focus elsewhere.”
Our approach
Helmes approached the engagement as a long-term ownership model rather than a traditional development project.
Fast onboarding with senior engineers
The engagement began in June 2023 with a focused onboarding and knowledge transfer phase.
Helmes assembled a senior engineering team experienced in complex enterprise environments. The team started contributing operational value within roughly two weeks and reached a high level of independence within about six weeks.
For Staffbase, the value was not just additional capacity. It was a team that could quickly take ownership of a complicated inherited system without requiring constant support.
Building a stable long-term maintenance model
The engagement was originally expected to last 6–12 months, but continued for three years as enterprise customers still relied on the platform and service quality remained important during the gradual phase-out.
Helmes started with a small core team, later scaling to around four engineers at peak capacity. The same core engineers stayed involved throughout the engagement, preserving system knowledge and avoiding repeated onboarding in a highly interconnected legacy environment.
During quieter periods or temporary budget adjustments, the team could scale down without losing continuity. Engineers shifted to other Helmes projects while remaining available whenever the workload increased again.
Focusing on risk reduction
The platform’s complexity went beyond ageing technology. Over time, it had accumulated tightly connected integrations, customer-specific configurations, and fragmented historical knowledge across multiple enterprise environments.
Rather than pursuing large-scale modernisation, the focus remained on operational reliability and reducing recurring maintenance effort.
This required senior engineers who were comfortable maintaining rather than rebuilding — people who could balance technical improvements against business priorities and recognise when not making a change delivered greater value.
Decisions were approached through a practical business lens:
- Would this reduce operational risk?
- Would it create meaningful value for customers and the business?
- Would it lower ongoing maintenance effort?
- Was the investment justified for a platform approaching end-of-life?
This helped avoid unnecessary change while improving the areas creating the most operational pressure. At the same time, new functionality was introduced where the expected value justified the investment, ensuring development efforts delivered measurable benefits for both Staffbase and its users.
A collaborative consulting partnership
Over time, the relationship evolved beyond operational maintenance into a broader consulting partnership.
Helmes worked closely with Staffbase on prioritisation, technical trade-offs, and long-term operational decisions, effectively shielding internal product teams from the day-to-day demands of the legacy platform so they could remain focused on core product development and innovation.
As one Helmes team member described it:
“We were not just delivering tickets and coding tasks. We were thinking along with the client about what made sense for the business, what should be changed, and what was better left alone.”
The solution
Helmes took ownership of the platform’s technical maintenance and operational reliability throughout the planned sunset period.
The team worked pragmatically:
- Some areas were stabilised and improved where the return justified the effort.
- Other areas were intentionally left unchanged because modifying them would have introduced unnecessary risk for a platform already approaching end-of-life.
As stability improved, the engagement gradually shifted from intensive day-to-day support into a leaner long-term maintenance model requiring significantly fewer support hours to maintain the same environment.
Applying a Zero Error Policy
As part of the maintenance model, Helmes applied its Zero Error Policy: a practical approach where recurring errors are treated as signals to investigate, not background noise to ignore.
In legacy environments, systems can generate large volumes of errors every day. When that happens, important issues are easily missed. Helmes first separated signal from noise by grouping errors into categories, identifying the most frequent or business-critical issues, and fixing the worst offenders first.
Once the error volume became manageable, the team worked through the remaining issues in iterations. Logs were monitored, tickets were created, fixes were implemented and released, and the team checked that the issue had actually disappeared.
This helped create cleaner monitoring dashboards and logs. Real issues became easier to identify, allowing the team to resolve problems proactively before they affected customers and making the platform easier to maintain.
The key point was shared ownership. Error monitoring was not assigned to one person or treated as a separate process. Every developer on the team was responsible for keeping the system healthy.
Results & benefits
Over the course of the engagement, the platform evolved from a resource-heavy legacy system into a far more predictable and operationally sustainable environment.
Recurring issues were reduced, reactive support workload decreased, and enterprise customers continued receiving reliable service. According to the Helmes team, some customers even requested service extensions because platform reliability and support quality had improved during the maintenance period.
The operating model also gave Staffbase flexibility to scale maintenance capacity up or down as business needs changed without losing accumulated system knowledge or continuity.
Key outcomes
Technologies
The engagement prioritised operational stability, predictable maintenance effort, and compatibility across an already complex enterprise environment.
Given the platform’s planned sunset trajectory, the focus remained on reducing risk rather than introducing large-scale architectural or functional changes.
Core technologies and platforms included:
- .NET 8/.NET 9/.NET 10
- Microsoft Azure (Azure SQL Database, Azure Service Bus, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Cloud Services, Azure Key Vault, Azure Storage)
- Terraform
- Azure DevOps Pipelines/Releases
- ElasticSearch
- React, Angular
- Redis Third-party social media APIs
- Custom enterprise integrations
Future Outlook
The platform is scheduled for final sunset, with Helmes continuing support through the last phase of the transition.
While the system itself is approaching end-of-life, the project demonstrated a broader capability increasingly relevant for enterprise organisations: maintaining legacy software pragmatically without diverting core engineering teams away from strategic priorities.
The engagement also reinforced an important operational principle:
Not every legacy platform needs immediate replacement. In some situations, improving reliability, reducing operational overhead, and creating time for better long-term decisions is the more sustainable business approach.
Work with us
Legacy systems rarely become difficult because of technology alone.
More often, complexity grows quietly over time, system knowledge becomes concentrated in a small number of people, and internal engineering teams get pulled away from growth initiatives by the demands of maintaining legacy systems.
Whether you are supporting an acquired platform, planning a gradual sunset, or trying to free senior engineers from steady-state maintenance work, Helmes can help create a practical path forward.
No rewrite agenda. No unnecessary complexity. Just experienced engineers who understand how to keep critical systems stable while the business focuses on what comes next.
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