Recent research highlights that Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) are increasingly shifting from operational roles to strategic leaders. They are now instrumental in defining long-term digital transformation strategies, ensuring organizations stay competitive as technology keeps changing.
Tespire’s CTO, Umar Madugu Shares His Story
How It Started
In the fast-paced world of technology, staying ahead of the curve is not just an advantage—it’s a necessity. The decision to rebuild Tespire’s tech stack from the ground up was a bold move that required vision and leadership to effectively improve scalability, and position the company for future growth.
It was clear that the existing tech stack was no longer aligned with the company’s ambitions. The infrastructure was struggling to keep up with the demands of a rapidly evolving market. Performance bottlenecks, scalability issues, and mounting technical debt were hindering innovation and slowing down product development.
Recognizing these challenges, the CTO made a compelling case for a complete overhaul of the tech stack. The goal was not just to fix immediate problems but to create a future-proof foundation that would enable Tespire to innovate faster, scale efficiently, and deliver exceptional value to its customers.
A Strategic Approach to Rebuilding
Rebuilding a tech stack is no small feat, especially for a company with active operations and a growing customer base. The CTO adopted a phased and strategic approach to ensure minimal disruption while maximizing long-term benefits.
The new tech stack was designed with scalability, flexibility, and performance in mind. The CTO championed the adoption of cutting-edge technologies, including cloud-native architectures, microservices, redis, and a new codebase structure termed the Modular Monolith with multiple repos. These allowed Tespire to build a more resilient and scalable infrastructure.
Understanding that a tech stack is only as good as the team using it, the CTO prioritized developer experience. The new stack was designed to streamline workflows, reduce friction, and empower developers to focus on innovation. Tools for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) were implemented to automate testing and deployment processes, while robust monitoring and logging systems provided greater visibility into system performance.
Rebuilding a tech stack is not without its challenges. One of the biggest hurdles was managing the transition without disrupting ongoing operations. The CTO addressed this by implementing a dual-track approach, where the legacy systems and new stack ran in parallel during the transition period. This allowed the team to gradually migrate services and ensure a smooth rollout.
Another challenge was ensuring buy-in from stakeholders across the organization. The CTO’s ability to communicate the long-term benefits of the rebuild—such as improved efficiency, faster time-to-market, and enhanced scalability—helped secure the support of leadership and team members alike.
How It Is Going
The impact of the tech stack rebuild has been transformative for Tespire. The company now boasts a more agile and scalable infrastructure, enabling it to respond quickly to market changes and customer demands. Development cycles have been significantly shortened, allowing Tespire to bring new products and features to market faster than ever before.
The system has gone from scheduled result computation exercises by not less than 10 persons for several days to student results being computed at any time and day by 1 person in less than 30 minutes.. The system is capable of independently computing and processing over 50,000 records in two minutes with zero interference. . We have built a system where schools can be self-boarded within minutes. This means we can set up 500 schools in a day and can be live almost immediately. This is a game changer because it takes schools months of planning to set up their school management system but with our system, they can have a complete solution that is working within minutes inclusive of a seamless payment gateway and custom website. They can also easily advertise their portal and gain admissions.
A Vision for the Future
For Tespire’s CTO, the rebuild was never just about fixing what was broken—it was about laying the groundwork for the future. With a robust and scalable tech stack in place, Tespire is now well-equipped to tackle new challenges and seize emerging opportunities.
We will be introducing our AI features, where school owners can use data from the system to predict and analyze various parts of the student’s learning capacity and the school’s earning power thereby reducing revenue leakages that schools encounter while improving student’s learning capacity and increasing parent satisfaction through our AI-enabled features. By focusing on scalability and efficiency, Tespire is positioning itself to better serve schools across Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa.
This strategic overhaul not only enhances operational efficiency but also aligns with Tespire's mission to make quality education more accessible. By leveraging a modernized tech stack, Tespire is set to transform educational operations and learning experiences in the region. Tespire exemplifies resilience, innovation, and a commitment to digital transformation. Our vision is to become a household name in the EdTech space across Africa.
Lessons Learned thus far
Reflecting on the journey, the CTO shared several key takeaways:Communication Is Key: Transparent communication with stakeholders and teams was critical to managing expectations and ensuring alignment.Invest in People: Empowering the engineering team with training and resources paid dividends in the transition.Embrace Change: Rebuilding a tech stack is a daunting task, but with the right mindset and strategy, it can drive transformative outcomes.
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