Leading strategic acquisition integration at MetaCompliance

Practical Leaders provided the driving force for this strategically critical technology integration, and their technical and delivery leadership approach instilled trust from all parties throughout. They established the strategy, built the team, and drove the delivery in a way that gave the Executive Leadership Team clear visibility and confidence. The pace at which the product vision came to life exceeded expectations. — Andy Fielder, CTO, MetaCompliance.

Summary

Practical Leaders led the technology integration of strategic acquisition Junglemap, bringing together the products, technologies, and engineering teams. Accountable to the Executive Leadership Team, our Transformation Consultant was responsible for establishing the technology strategy, steering the product roadmap and UX design of the unified experience, building a cross-organisation delivery team from scratch, and guiding delivery.

We delivered a thin, working end-to-end user journey first — a Walking Skeleton — so technology hurdles surfaced early, and stakeholders could see tangible progress from the outset.

Creating strong product and technology foundations was essential, but equally impactful was the speed at which we built a high-performing team. This involved transforming a group of individuals with a mix of cultures, languages, and organisational norms into a gelled team while establishing a robust agile delivery process.

The timescales were ambitious, but stakeholders were impressed with the rate at which the product vision was brought to life. Where hurdles emerged, they were promptly identified and addressed to keep delivery on track. Our engagement set this large project up for success so that the team could carry the work through to a successful conclusion beyond our involvement.

Client overview

MetaCompliance Limited is a global leader in cybersecurity awareness education and human risk management. Following the Junglemap acquisition, the combined group has around 300 staff.

Context

MetaCompliance acquired Junglemap to bring in new product capabilities and to extend the customer base in the Nordic region.

While MetaCompliance’s flagship MyCompliance product and the Junglemap product both appeal to mid-sized and enterprise scale customers, MyCompliance’s advanced features are most valued by larger and more advanced customers, while Junglemap’s intentionally simple and streamlined product makes it an excellent fit for smaller, entry level customers. Bringing the products together had the potential to better serve the needs of both customer bases, but if done poorly it could instead alienate both.

Practical Leaders were engaged to lead this strategically significant product integration, having previously led complex technology initiatives of comparable scale and risk.

Approach

Building foundations

We began by establishing close working relationships with the Junglemap team. Through in-person and remote workshops, we built mutual understanding and performed a thorough discovery to ensure MetaCompliance had a full understanding of the unique features of the Junglemap product, the tech stack, and existing ways of working. It was equally important to introduce the Junglemap team to the MyCompliance product and the way MetaCompliance works. By taking a deliberately targeted approach, we helped teams align at the right pace to ensure cohesion and productivity without jarring and disruptive change for change’s sake.

Product strategy

The two products served overlapping but distinct user bases, and were complementary rather than straightforwardly commonalised. A clean migration path for existing Junglemap customers was considered essential. Any perceived loss of the simplicity and streamlined experience they valued would put retention at risk.

To ground decisions in validated needs rather than assumptions, we ran workshops with key business stakeholders from both organisations. These surfaced the commercial drivers, desired outcomes, and pain points on each side, and made the similarities and differences between the two product propositions explicit. The output of these workshops shaped a phased product strategy.

In Phase 1, we focused on like-for-like integration: bringing Junglemap’s NanoLearning functionality into MyCompliance, while preserving the key features, look, and feel of Junglemap. This kept disruption to existing Junglemap customers to a minimum and allowed us to deliver the integration without waiting on broader product changes.

Phase 2 covered deeper integration, requiring changes to existing MyCompliance features so that MyCompliance’s Fusion learning and Junglemap’s NanoLearning could work seamlessly together as a coherent unified experience.

My focus throughout this integration was making sure our commercial teams understood what the combined product offered customers at each stage. Practical Leaders led the creation of a product roadmap supported by Figma designs and validated through customer feedback and betas. They prioritised delivering real functionality quickly, giving early confidence. Together, this enabled proactive conversations with customers and prospects about what the product would look like at each stage. — Neil Leishman, Chief Financial Operations Officer, MetaCompliance.

UX and design

We steered the information architecture development for the unified experience, mapping user journeys to establish a clear and coherent structure before any design work began. From this foundation we oversaw the production of UX wireframes, assembled into clickable prototypes, giving stakeholders from both MetaCompliance and Junglemap something tangible to review and critique. Validating the design direction with both teams early meant assumptions were tested before they were built, and the resulting designs reflected the needs of both user bases.

Technology strategy

The technology strategy mirrored the phased product approach. On the front end, we aligned to MetaCompliance’s strategic direction of React-based micro-frontends, giving us a path to a single coherent user experience without rewriting either product wholesale. On the back end, we kept changes to a minimum in Phase 1: behind the scenes, the integrated experience was served by a mixture of systems, but this was invisible to users.

This pragmatism was deliberate. Avoiding unnecessary changes in Phase 1 accelerated time to value and reduced delivery risk during the most uncertain phase of the integration. More substantive back-end alignment was deferred to Phase 2, once the integrated experience was proven and the team had built up confidence working across both codebases.

People and culture

The delivery team was built from scratch and was deliberately small to keep coordination overhead low while we established foundations. It comprised one permanent MetaCompliance engineer, one permanent Junglemap engineer, one contractor, and four engineers from an established near-shore delivery partner. Building on an existing partner relationship, new team members were brought on following our thorough screening process to ensure the right fit for the engagement. Between them, the team spanned five nationalities and several first languages.

This diversity was a strength, but it meant we could not rely on shared norms, communication styles, or assumptions about how work gets done. We invested early and deliberately in turning the group into a team. That meant agreeing clear ways of working, accommodating different communication preferences, and creating space for people to bring their full expertise regardless of which organisation they came from or where they sat.

We also worked to neutralise any sense of “us and them” between MetaCompliance and Junglemap engineers and stakeholders. Both products had passionate advocates, and both had genuine strengths worth carrying forward. Framing decisions in terms of user and business outcomes rather than organisational allegiance helped the team focus on building the best unified product rather than defending existing positions.

When a larger company acquires you, there is always uncertainty about how the transition will be handled. We are proud of what we have built at Junglemap, and it mattered to us that it was treated with respect in the integration. Practical Leaders handled this with care and good judgement, and the feedback from our team in Norway reflects that. — Goran Govorcinovic, CEO, Junglemap.

Delivery approach

We ran two-week sprints with the standard set of agile events: planning, daily stand-ups, refinement, retrospectives, and a stakeholder demo at the end of every sprint. The discipline of demoing every two weeks kept the team honest about what was genuinely done and gave stakeholders a regular, predictable rhythm of visible progress.

The Walking Skeleton was the spine of the delivery approach. We implemented a thin end-to-end user journey first, touching every layer of the integrated stack. We prioritised solving the hardest technical problems early: authentication and identity across the two systems, how features from each product would be surfaced in a single experience, how data would flow, and where the seams would sit. Hitting these challenges early, when the cost of change was lowest, derisked the rest of the delivery.

Sprint demos to stakeholders from both MetaCompliance and Junglemap were particularly valuable. They turned what could have been an opaque, anxiety-inducing integration into something stakeholders could see, react to, and steer. When unforeseen hurdles emerged, they were surfaced quickly and addressed to minimise their impact.

What I valued most was your ability to keep the conversation at the right level: clear enough for business stakeholders, but grounded in real technical feasibility. You took the integration hypotheses, tested them with the team, shaped the options behind the scenes, and came back with business-led recommendations rather than technical noise. That helped keep the product integration roadmap focused on commercial value, sequence, and stakeholder buy-in. — Anton Pipko, Integration Programme Lead.

Outcomes

Within the first few sprints, the Walking Skeleton was deployed to production behind a feature switch. From that point, every subsequent increment of functionality was integrated into a working end-to-end product, rather than waiting for a big-bang integration milestone. This continuous integration into a real production environment meant the team and stakeholders had high confidence in what had been built and what remained.

Building the team was as much an achievement as the delivery outcomes. A group that had not worked together before, drawn from multiple organisations and several countries, gelled quickly into a productive unit with shared ways of working and a shared sense of ownership. Retention of key Junglemap engineering knowledge through the transition was a particular success, and a known risk in any acquisition of this kind.

Stakeholders were impressed with the rate at which the product vision became a reality and with the transparency of the delivery process. The Executive Leadership Team had clear, regular visibility of progress and could make informed decisions about scope, sequencing, and go-live planning based on what they saw working in demos rather than on forecasts alone.

At the conclusion of our engagement, the integrated product was in production behind a feature switch and in active internal beta testing as part of a staged rollout: internal beta testing, followed by customer beta testing in production test tenants, and then gradual rollout to new and existing customers. The foundations, team, and delivery rhythm were in place to carry the work through to general availability without our continued involvement.

The acquisition increased the customer base by 50% to a total of 3,000 customers, with a material uplift in annual recurring revenue. By delivering a smooth migration path and preserving the Junglemap experience, the integration protected this revenue base while opening the route to deeper cross-sell and upsell opportunities across the combined product portfolio.