Spartan Race: Eliminating Vulnerabilities and Reducing Cost by 32% 

About the Client

Spartan Race is the world’s most popular obstacle course race and endurance brand. It gathers a community of millions enthusiasts around the globe, hosting over 250 events annually across more than 40 countries.

As their global footprint continuously grows, so does the need to strengthen the digital infrastructure supporting it. Recognising this, they partnered with Q to run an in-depth Spartan technology due diligence assessment, ensuring their digital platforms are secure, scalable, and ready to support future innovation and expansion.

Project

Management

Our assessment identified opportunities to significantly improve delivery efficiency through enhanced planning and clearer role definitions. By introducing core planning frameworks and optimized team structure, we recommended a shift in the Project Management approach – from basic maintenance to product excellence, which will enable faster execution, better alignment, and long-term scalability and growth.

Backend

Q technical due diligence detected key backend challenges affecting stability, security, delivery speed, and overall maintainability. We provided actionable recommendations to reduce technical debt, strengthen security posture, and improve code maintainability, laying the groundwork for more reliable performance and faster development cycles.

Frontend

The frontend codebase also showed a high degree of technical debt, including code duplication and other code quality issues, which impact the speed of delivering new features, time to market, and overall product reliability. They also increase the risk of bugs, raise maintenance costs, and slow down future development efforts. Within our recommendations, we outlined a path to improve agility, reduce risk, and better position the product for scalable growth.

DevOps

The DevOps analysis identified several critical gaps requiring immediate attention. We recommended security posture enhancement, CI/CD process optimization, monitoring and
alerting framework development, DevOps practice implementation, and disaster recovery planning and validation. Following the implementation of our recommendations, Spartan saw a 32% reduction in AWS infrastructure costs, significantly improving overall efficiency

Quality Assurance

Among all assessed areas, QA function showed the least critical risk, but still presented room for improvement. We identified the absence of standardized QA processes as the main pain point, because it reduces consistency and scalability and limits the organization’s ability to ensure a high-quality user experience. Strengthening this area is key to reducing manual effort and improving reliability. We also introduced automation which will additionally increase the organization’s opportunity for product and team scaling.

Spartan technology due diligence project resulted in a comprehensive and actionable report that highlighted areas of risk and opportunity. The report also outlined a path forward — practical short term and long term roadmaps, by simultaneously identifying gaps and pointing out improvements that are aligned with the organization’s broader strategic goals. The assessment also uncovered significant opportunities to reduce costs, particularly through optimizing AWS infrastructure. Last but not least, the analysis outlined what it will take to shift from a reactive, maintenance-heavy approach to one that supports product excellence and sustainable growth.

The success of the tech due diligence project built a strong foundation of trust and alignment between Spartan and Q, leading Spartan to continue partnering with us. Following the assessment recommendations, we have now moved to hands-on development.