Enabling global marketing for a pharmaceutical company

Kirschbaum was tasked with building a greenfield platform to enable marketers of a global pharmaceutical company to create emails, static websites, and print materials using a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface. From the project's inception, our developers served as the primary development team, establishing a modern foundation using Laravel. The platform was designed to empower non-technical users to build custom, reusable templates through "variables" libraries and pre-defined modules. A critical requirement was the integration of local legal text modules and specialized tools for pharmaceutical sales, ensuring compliance across diverse global demographics.

The project began with a small, focused team but quickly scaled, requiring us to guide several medium-sized teams on a single codebase. This rapid growth necessitated clear application boundaries and "bridges" of shared code to prevent team conflict and overlap.

The complexity was compounded by a progressive global rollout across multiple international regions with vastly different pharmaceutical advertising laws.

As the team expanded, institutional knowledge within a small group of senior engineers became a bottleneck, creating high onboarding friction. At the same time, the organization was standardizing its Agile delivery practices, adding another layer of coordination alongside the technical execution.

We leveraged Domain Driven Design (DDD) to structure the project, which allowed us to maintain a sharp focus on the scope of features like reusable, categorized templates and template variable libraries. Our technical strategy was underpinned by Test Driven Development (TDD), implementing robust backend functional unit testing and automated end-to-end browser testing for critical user workflows.

To manage the intersections of infrastructure and software across multiple teams, we maintained a comprehensive directory of external team contacts, mapped to each project's scope. We prioritized process standardization by establishing Agile ceremonies, Jira ticket templates, and Git commit guidelines. Recognizing that tribal knowledge was a risk to scalability, we adopted a "documentation first" mentality, developing feature-specific documentation to streamline onboarding. Regular cross-team leadership meetings and standardized Git workflows were instrumental in resolving information gaps and code conflicts early in the development cycle.

The technology transformation delivered significant operational improvements and global scalability:

• Drastic time-to-market reduction: By iteratively improving features, we reduced the marketing material approval cycle from two months to just four days.

• Compliance automation: We built a real-time validation system that highlights unaddressed legal requirements during the design process, ensuring compliance is built-in rather than an afterthought.

• MLR optimization: We developed an evaluation system that helps marketers identify content likely to require additional revisions before Medical-Legal Review (MLR), providing actionable suggestions prior to submission.

• Global scale: The unified platform successfully supports over a dozen countries across multiple continents, accommodating regional variations within a single, maintainable codebase.

This project highlighted that as a team scales, communication becomes as critical as the code itself. Regular cross-team meetings and open, feature-specific documentation are not just "nice-to-haves"; they are essential infrastructure that supports development velocity.

We also learned the importance of architectural flexibility; for instance, a "Positioned Modules" interface would have been more robust than our initial "Module Layers" approach for non-layered designs. Ultimately, the success of the platform was rooted in early standardization of Git workflows and Agile ceremonies, which allowed us to transition from a small "tribal" team to a high-performing, multi-team organization that delivers global impact.