“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."
Justin Ammerlaan, CTO, Empower

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.

• Reduced incident response time by up to 40%
• Reduced delays between product and development Q&A by up to 50%
• Automated code reviews across multiple platforms, often reducing PR created to approval times as much as 50%

The Problem

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."
James Garrett, Staff Backend Engineer, Empower

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:

• Delays in code review feedback due to time zone differences
• Communication gaps that led to misunderstandings about code changes
• Challenges in understanding the full impact of changes across multiple platforms
• Release delays caused by waiting for cross-timezone clarifications

3. Technical Knowledge Transfer Challenges

Product Managers often found it challenging to bridge the gap between technical and business teams. Key challenges included:

• The need for multiple meetings to understand technical implementations
• Difficulty in visualizing user journeys and system interactions
• Time lost in scheduling developer meetings for clarifications
• Challenges in explaining technical decisions to business stakeholders

4. Maintaining Code Quality Consistency

As the organization scaled, ensuring code consistency became increasingly difficult. Engineers faced several key challenges:

• Enforcing uniform coding standards across multiple pods
• Maintaining consistency in code reviews
• Ensuring proper implementation of internal frameworks and interfaces
• Optimizing Entity Framework queries for performance

The Solution

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 Impact

• Accelerated Incident Resolution: Reduced average incident response time by up to 40%.
• Transformed QA Process: QA Engineers can now leverage Factory for basic questions around a feature and what to test.
• Empowered Product Development: Direct access to technical information without developer dependencies and ability to generate visual representations of system flows.
• Enhanced Review Process: Ensured consistent implementation of internal interfaces and maintained database schema consistency.

“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.”
James Garrett, Staff Backend Engineer, Empower

Looking to accelerate your software development? Learn more about Factory.