When in 2012 the world’s largest for-profit genealogy company Ancestry.com announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with a Silicon Valley-based startup Inflection to acquire its competitor Archives.com for $100 million in cash no one really knew that Archives.com might have some Ukrainian roots. As a part of this sale – a number of Archive.com’s employees including the core engineering group from Lviv, Ukraine joined the Ancestry.com team after the acquisition was closed. Archives.com focuses on helping its users discover their family history. The service’s archive of 11.4 billion historical records includes photos, newspapers, and vital records that can help you find information about your ancestors, build your family tree, etc.
The core engineering team fully resided in Lviv under Andriy Kohut’s supervision (UKEESS CTO). Believe it or not, but pretty much all website’s functionality was developed by 13 engineers, including 6-7 senior back-end engineers, 3 front-end engineers, and 3 QAs. Time difference with product managers/owners in California played very well while iterating quickly through product development short life cycles. The development team was executing new feature development very quickly during US night time. They would do demo/reviews during overlap time and get new and revised specs over nighttime – overall that reduced development time a lot and less than under 3 years the product became the third key player in the industry.