Payfit Reduces Feature Deployment from 5 Days to 2 Hours with Nx Monorepo Revival

Payfit is a fast-growing startup that provides payroll and HR solutions to businesses across Europe. As their engineering organization scaled, they faced the classic challenge of maintaining development velocity while managing an increasingly complex codebase. With a lean platform team of just four engineers responsible for frontend tooling, design systems, monorepo health, and CI/CD, efficiency wasn't just important—it was critical for survival in the competitive startup landscape.

Challenge

Payfit's journey with Nx began with a top-down mandate that didn't include the necessary knowledge transfer or support systems.

"Nx was forced from management to all teams to have a monorepo, but no one knows how to use Nx and everything, so no one took care of the monorepo."

This led to a predictable outcome: teams abandoned the monorepo entirely. At a critical tipping point, engineering teams extracted themselves from the shared workspace, prioritizing autonomy over the collaborative benefits that a well-managed monorepo could provide.

The consequences of this fragmentation were severe:

• Deployment complexity – Deploying a single feature required navigating multiple repositories and systems sequentially, taking between 2 and 5 days to complete.
• Lost development velocity – Teams accepted slower development pace as the cost of independence.
• Fragmented ownership – No clear ownership or maintenance of shared tooling and infrastructure.
• CI/CD inefficiencies – Each repository required its own CI setup and optimization, leading to duplicated effort and inconsistent performance.

In a startup environment where speed to market is crucial, these delays were becoming a significant competitive disadvantage.

Solution

Nicolas Beaussart joined Payfit as a staff engineer with a clear mission: revive the monorepo and restore development velocity. Rather than forcing teams back immediately, the platform team took a strategic approach focused on proving value through execution.

The team focused on making the monorepo a compelling choice rather than a mandate:

• Invested in monorepo health – Properly configured Nx with task inference to ensure everything worked smoothly out of the box.
• Leveraged Nx Cloud – Implemented Nx Cloud to dramatically speed up CI performance and eliminate the manual optimization burden.
• Pilot program approach – Started with a few pilot teams to migrate back and demonstrate the benefits in practice.
• Created social proof – Early positive feedback from pilot teams served as validation for other teams considering the migration.

Offloading Complexity with Nx Cloud

One of the most significant improvements came from adopting Nx Cloud to handle CI optimization. This shift from manual CI optimization to automated intelligence freed the platform team to focus on higher-value work while ensuring optimal performance.

The strategic approach paid off. Positive feedback from pilot teams created a snowball effect:

"Slowly but surely it went into a snowball effect where now teams want to migrate themselves back into the monorepo directly themselves."

This organic adoption was far more sustainable than the original top-down mandate, as teams could see the concrete benefits in their daily work.

Results

Dramatic Reduction in Deployment Time

The most striking improvement was in feature deployment speed:

• From 2-5 days to 2 hours maximum – A reduction of up to 97% in deployment time
• 4x faster development – Features that previously took weeks to code and deploy now take a quarter of the time

Restored Team Confidence in Monorepo Architecture

The platform team successfully reversed the initial exodus from the monorepo:

• Teams now actively request to migrate back to the main monorepo
• 100% positive feedback from teams that have migrated back
• Strong social proof driving organic adoption across the organization

Operational Efficiency Through Automation

By leveraging Nx Cloud's intelligent CI optimization, the platform team eliminated a major operational burden:

• Zero time spent on manual CI optimization and load balancing
• Predictable performance without manual intervention
• Direct support channel with Nx team for any optimization needs

Competitive Advantage in Startup Environment

For a startup where speed to market is crucial, these improvements translated directly to business impact:

"This is critical in a startup world where things need to move fast, and a big part of this answer is Nx and Nx Cloud. Without those pieces, I don't think we could have the same velocity that we have right now."

The transformation enabled Payfit to maintain their competitive edge while scaling their engineering organization efficiently.