THE WING: Case Study | Cult of Coders

A network of work and community spaces designed for women, and the membership platform running behind it.

the challenge

Founded in 2016, The Wing is a community of women across the US and beyond, built around the professional, civic, social and economic advancement of women.

The spaces are physical; the membership is not. Joining, paying and renewing all happen in software, which put a growing membership business on a stack the team had already decided to leave.

objectives

The engagement started as an improvement plan for the existing website, became a move to newer technologies, and settled into ongoing work on the framework and new features.
Move the billing without interrupting members who were already paying.
Give the team direct access to member records instead of routing every question through an engineer.

our solution

The core job was moving off Meteor.

Payments went first, from Stripe to Zuora and Cyberspace. The migration had to carry existing members and their billing history across without any of them noticing.

We built an admin interface for user details, so the team could settle a membership question themselves rather than filing it.

Then the data layer. We restructured the database and added a data-fetching layer between it and the application, which cut page load and response times sharply.

The Wing has drawn coverage in The New York Times and Vox.