Taking over a live product with no formal handover

Context

It’s Layered is a community loyalty platform: consumer brands reward customers for recommending products in the places recommendations actually happen — community forums, group threads, private conversations — rather than at checkout. The platform publishes a roster of more than thirty brands and seventeen thousand members.

The system behind it is not a single application: a NestJS API, a Next.js admin console, a React Native mobile app, a Fastify backend-for-frontend, an embedded Shopify app, and AWS infrastructure defined in code — six interdependent services in one TypeScript monorepo.

We took it over in June 2026 from a developer who was no longer available. There was no formal knowledge transfer — no walkthrough, no documentation, and no one to ask. The product was live, with real users on it, throughout — and the surface to understand was all six services, not one.

Leadership & decisions

Stabilise before building. The pressure on a takeover is to demonstrate value by shipping something visible. I held the opposite line: fix what is broken in production first. A team that ships features into a system it does not yet understand is generating future bugs at speed.

Learning the system by fixing it. With no handover available, the fastest honest route into an unfamiliar codebase is triaging its live defects. Every bug fixed is a piece of the system understood, and the understanding accrues where the product is actually fragile rather than where documentation would have said it was.

Managing a client through the unknown period. The hardest stretch of a takeover is the beginning, when the team cannot yet answer basic questions about a product the client depends on. Saying that plainly, rather than projecting false confidence, is what keeps the relationship intact long enough to earn the confidence back.

Outcome

Multiple live bugs resolved and new features delivered, within weeks of taking the codebase on. The engagement is ongoing.