Halyard is an applied research studio building real-time generative tools for filmmakers, animators and product designers. As a twelve-person team that ships every week, every second of build time is a second not spent on craft.
Iteration speed decides what a research team can actually ship, and Kestrel took almost all of the waiting out of our week.
The team at Halyard originally deployed their five properties with a mix of static hosting, a self-managed CI runner and a build script they maintained by hand. That held together in the early days, but after a period of growth they needed a stack that could run all five sites and scale alongside them. Propagating DNS changes could take hours, and builds ate minutes they no longer had to spare. “After moving to Kestrel over a single afternoon, build times went from 6–9 minutes on our own runner to 38 seconds,” says Ferreira.
Halyard's engineers also tightened their feedback cycles with Kestrel Preview Deployments. “Having inline comments built into the staging link sounds small, and it gives us back a few hours every week,” explains Theo Brandt, who leads growth marketing at Halyard. Whether stakeholders are reviewing launch copy or a brand implementation, the conversation is far smoother when they can comment directly in the browser instead of reopening the design file.
Beyond builds and review cycles, the team is measurably more confident in how their sites behave in the wild. With Kestrel Analytics they watch the health and traffic of all five properties from one dashboard, and they can see that real visitors are landing on pages scoring 96 for performance.
Would your team benefit from shorter builds and faster review loops? Get in touch.