How a lean team ships faster without burning out their engineers
Jeff Israel's team supports 75,000+ customers across Texas with a handful of engineers. Pebble lets developers stay on complex work while the steady stream of fixes, UAT changes, and refactors gets handled in parallel.
An Austin, TX based income and tax solutions company with ~40 employees supports over 75,000 customers throughout Texas, helping property owners protest their tax assessments while running a full CPA and IRS resolution practice. Behind the scenes, Jeff Israel leads a small dev team that keeps the software running for all of it — inside an organization where the pressure to deliver never stops.
The drain on engineering wasn't the big projects. It was everything pulling focus away from them: stakeholder UAT changes, small customer-facing fixes, infrastructure work that was hard to justify to non-technical stakeholders. Pebble changed the calculus.
Real customer fixes, fast
A regex buried in the login flow was silently locking out customers with uncommon domain extensions. Jeff assigned it to Pebble and it was hot-fixed quickly. He can point to 8–10 similar customer-facing fixes in the past two months alone — each one shipped without pulling a developer off the work they were actually trying to finish.
When I open a Pebble PR, I feel a certain level of comfort. I know what I'm gonna look for. I'm not going in ready to be surprised.
Last-minute changes become non-events
When stakeholders show up to UAT with a 30-page Word doc of copy changes, the team now creates tickets during the meeting and assigns them to Pebble on the spot. Developers stay focused on complex work. Everything else moves in parallel, no babysitting required.
I create the ticket and immediately assign Pebble to it, in the moment, right after a meeting, and that work kicks off. I don't have to babysit it.
Technical debt gets done (without the argument)
Convincing non-technical stakeholders to invest in infrastructure work is a hard sell. Jeff stopped making it. He assigns refactors to Pebble, and when things get faster and more reliable, stakeholders notice on their own.
The real value is keeping devs focused on the large, complex tasks — and using Pebble for everything else that's important but shouldn't require their full attention.
Over 1,100 new customers signed up in the final days of the Texas property tax deadline, up from 750 the year before. Pebble-assisted builds and bug fixes were woven throughout the product they shipped.
Jeff has tried a lot of AI dev tools. The ones that don't last are unpredictable. Pebble is consistent: the Jira comments, the GitHub PR updates, the steady incremental improvements — and that consistency is what his team actually trusts.
If our stakeholders were like, 'can't you just build this instead of us paying for it?' I'd be like, no. I mean, could I? Maybe. But how quickly? No thank you. This is a buy.
