Nav helps small business owners take control of their financial future by building tools that can help improve credit health and unlock better financing opportunities. Their engineering team operates in a fast-paced, collaborative environment with engineers, designers, and product managers working closely together to deliver meaningful features at speed.

To keep pace with their ambitions, Nav needed a better way to manage development and testing environments. That’s where Crafting came in.

The Challenges

As Nav’s engineering team grew, their manual, shared development environments became a bottleneck. With only three environments available, engineers often had to wait their turn to test their code. Once they had access, they had to quickly get through their workflows so they didn’t block others.

We had a spreadsheet to ‘check out’ an environment to avoid stepping on one another’s toes.

The team also needed to keep branches available for QA and stakeholder review without locking out others from testing WIP features. While adding more environments could help, over-provisioning came with higher costs and expensive machines idling during off-hours.

Engineers needed ways to work independently in reliable environments without blocking each other so they could focus on their customers’ needs.

The Solution

Nav partnered with Crafting to unlock a better way to manage their software development lifecycle. With Crafting’s on-demand, Kubernetes-integrated sandboxes, Nav engineers can now create isolated, reproducible environments for every feature branch with just a few clicks.

Crafting helped us get our environment set up exactly how we wanted

Nav also took advantage of shared templates so engineers could rely on environment configurations that worked for others to get up and running quickly on different parts of the tech stack.

Engineers can also share templates, resolve issues in each other’s sandboxes, and manage their development workflows more cleanly—saving time and reducing friction across the board.

The Results

The speed and ease of creating a new environment dramatically reduced the amount of time engineers spent trying to get things working. Engineers no longer needed to rely on flaky, static staging environments with manual deploys and checkouts. They could spin up fresh sandboxes quickly, collaborate more fluidly, and keep QA and other stakeholder previews live without blocking others.

The integration with our Kubernetes cluster has been a pleasant surprise and greatly simplifies our sandboxes

Since adopting Crafting, Nav’s engineering team has increased their velocity, improved how easy it is to test features, and reduced collaboration overhead with everyone able to have their own production-like environment whenever they need it.

Beyond increased productivity, Crafting has enabled cost savings as well. With engineers able to spin up individual sandboxes on demand, Nav has scaled down redundant and over-provisioned parts of their staging infrastructure.

Ready to modernize your development environments?

Let’s talk. Crafting can help your team eliminate bottlenecks, boost developer velocity, and scale more efficiently, just like we’ve done with Nav.