
April 7, 2025 - 2 minute read
How Empower Decreased Incident Response Times by 40% with Factory
Case Study
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April 7, 2025 - 2 minute read
Case Study
Share this article
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"Factory is the future of software engineering—where AI handles the heavy lifting, and humans guide the vision, gaining extraordinary leverage with every line of code."
Empower, a leading financial technology company providing instant cash advances and credit-building solutions, partnered with Factory to transform their development workflow. As an early adopter of Factory's platform and Review Droid product, Empower has successfully integrated AI across their entire development lifecycle, resulting in faster incident resolution, improved code quality, and enhanced cross-team collaboration.
As a rapidly growing fintech company handling billions in transactions annually, Empower faced several critical challenges in maintaining their development velocity while ensuring code quality and system reliability.
1. Complex On-Call Scenarios
Incident response presented a significant challenge for engineers, especially when facing novel issues that required immediate resolution. The reliance on internal runbooks often proved inadequate, leading to longer resolution times and increased system downtime.
"Almost 100% of engineers will tell you they're at least slightly nervous when on call, or they'll lie to you. The outliers are either superhuman or just haven't been on 'that one outage call' which you'll remember for years to come."
2. Cross-Time Zone Collaboration Barriers
With engineering teams distributed across the United States, New Zealand, South America, Canada, and Australia, Empower faced challenges in its QA processes:
3. Technical Knowledge Transfer Challenges
Product Managers often found it challenging to bridge the gap between technical and business teams. Key challenges included:
4. Maintaining Code Quality Consistency
As the organization scaled, ensuring code consistency became increasingly difficult. Engineers faced several key challenges:
Recognizing these challenges, Empower partnered with Factory to implement a structured, AI-driven approach to development. By leveraging Factory’s Platform and Review Droid, Empower transformed its engineering processes. The team leveraged Factory's capabilities across multiple use cases:
Incident Response: AI-assisted diagnostics accelerated root cause analysis and resolution.
QA Impact Analysis: Automated risk assessments eliminated 24-hour cross-timezone delays.
Product Management: Natural language queries and system flowchart generation simplified technical insights.
Review Droid: Automated code reviews enforced best practices, optimized queries, and maintained schema integrity.
"The key lesson I've learned is that AI's value extends far beyond code generation and it's not about replacing people - it's about enhancing human capabilities across all aspects of software development so that worker productivity increases. The best tools are those that make teams more effective, and in 2025, that increasingly means tools that can think alongside us, helping to bridge gaps in understanding and automate routine cognitive tasks."
Looking to accelerate your software development? Learn more about Factory.
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