Polestar × Yalta
Early 2019. Polestar had committed to selling cars exclusively online — and had almost no digital capabilities in place to do it. A handful of developers. No platform. A hard deadline.
The result? In January 2020, Polestar was selling cars online.
On time. Within budget. With a platform built to grow.
Yalta built the teams, the tools, and the systems from scratch.
Together with our sister companies at Vinn*.
Here's our story.
SPEED
Car manufacturing punishes mistakes. Software rewards learning from them.
Yalta built fast and iterated on real feedback — proving that speed and quality aren't opposites.
DIRECTION
Moving fast requires knowing what to cut. Yalta pushed for a prioritization framework that gave Polestar a single, clarifying question for every decision:
Will this help us sell cars in January 2020?
That framework stuck. Years later, its principles are still valid in Polestar's decision hierarchy, communication channels, and tooling.
CULTURE
Speed at scale only works when teams trust each other. We gave development teams real authority — and people rose to it.
HOW WE DID IT
A recruitment machine. Polestar's brand and a cutting-edge tech stack made it possible to attract serious talent fast. Yalta ran hundreds of interviews and onboarded an average of 10 new team members every week — growing the organisation from 1 to 11 teams in just four months.
A platform team. One team focused entirely on shared infrastructure: authentication, security, monitoring, reusable components. Invisible to end users, but making every other team 10× more effective.
A strategy-into-action office. No micromanagement. Yalta and Goovinn together cleared political and logistical roadblocks, protected the culture, and kept Polestar's leadership informed on cost, allocation, and progress — without micromanaging the teams doing the work.