We helped Lyka modernise its platform and launch a new brand.

Overview

Lyka delivers fresh, portioned dog food through a personalised subscription service. As it grew from startup to scale-up, the business embarked on a modernisation initiative to support faster iteration, continued growth, and new product offerings.

Its engineering team was straddling the parallel challenges of moving from a PHP monolith to a microservice architecture, while rebuilding customer-facing applications at the same time.

Lyka brought Thinkmill in as an embedded engineering partner. Working closely with its engineers, designers, and product managers, we contributed hands-on implementation, architecture support, and delivery leadership across the platform. The partnership also supported the launch of Tyga, a new cat food brand built on those emerging foundations.

Experienced engineering, embedded across teams

Our partnership reached across four Lyka teams. We worked closely with engineering, design, and product in each, adapting to their priorities and contributing to day-to-day delivery.

In the customer account team, we helped rebuild existing capabilities on a modern front-end stack for their customer management portal, plus internal customer admin tools, combining implementation with front-end guidance and reusable component development.

For the operations team, we helped validate and roll out improvements to the queueing architecture which supports warehouse packing and order fulfilment. We also provided interim engineering management, contributing to planning and prioritisation alongside hands-on architectural support.

In the growth team, we helped ship multiple acquisition experiments each week while improving the supporting code and reducing reliance on legacy parts of the platform.

Across these teams, close collaboration allowed us to contribute where it mattered most: delivering immediate product priorities while supporting Lyka’s broader platform modernisation.

The same approach carried into the Tyga team, a delivery group charged with delivering Lyka’s new cat food brand, where our role spanned engineering, architecture, and delivery management.

Launching a new brand on a shared platform

Tyga needed a complete digital experience for launch: a marketing website, a customer acquisition journey, subscription management, and the tools for customer care staff to support it.

We worked alongside Lyka engineers, designers, and product managers to build these experiences on the new microservice platform. Our contribution spanned front-end and back-end engineering, and delivery management to coordinate priorities and dependencies across the work.

At the heart of the acquisition experience was “build a box”: a guided journey that asks customers about their cat’s age, activity, diet, and more to recommend a subscription suited to their unique needs.

Supporting a new type of animal also meant accommodating different product and subscription requirements. We helped adapt the shared back-end while building the customer accounts and customer care portal needed to manage those subscriptions.

With marketing activity and food production aligned to a fixed launch date, the customer experience and supporting tools needed to be ready together. We exceeded expectations by delivering more functionality than originally planned for the launch MVP.