Fingerprint: “Unblocked is our single source of truth for code knowledge.”

June 2, 2025

Fingerprint, a leader in device identification technology, helps businesses recognize returning users and prevent fraud. Over the past two years, the company scaled rapidly, doubling its fully remote engineering team to more than 60 engineers across multiple time zones. As the team grew, so did the volume of questions from new hires and cross-functional partners. Responding to these questions became a growing time sink for the team.

Ekan Subramanian, VP of Engineering at Fingerprint, knew they needed a scalable way to support internal knowledge sharing. That’s when they brought in Unblocked.

"Unblocked lives up to its name. Our team can quickly access the answers they need without waiting for responses or fearing judgment. It saves time for everyone involved." — Ekan Subramanian, VP Engineering at Fingerprint

The Challenge: Scaling internal support in a remote team

Despite having solid documentation, Fingerprint was losing valuable development time to knowledge gaps.

A major challenge was the constant reliance on experienced engineers to pass down institutional knowledge. Much of the critical context—like why things were built a certain way, how the systems interacted, and how to query a particular database—was buried in commit messages, Slack threads, internal docs, and bug trackers. New hires and cross-functional teams often didn’t know where to look, so they turned to the people who did.

“A lot of the same questions had already been answered,” explained Ekan, “but unless you knew the exact keywords to search for, it was hard to find the information.” As a result, senior engineers were frequently pulled into conversations to answer the same questions over and over. These interruptions quickly added up, making it harder for the team to make progress.

“We had a strong written culture, but finding information wasn’t always easy. Teams spent time answering repeat questions, pulling them away from feature work.” — Ekan Subramanian, VP Engineering at Fingerprint

The Solution: Making tribal knowledge self-serve

To close the knowledge gap, Fingerprint introduced Unblocked, a tool that helps engineers quickly find answers about their code. It pulls context from Fingerprint’s GitHub, Notion, Slack, and JIRA to provide helpful explanations.

Before long, Unblocked became a vital part of their internal support workflow. “We use Unblocked to field questions in every engineering team’s Slack support channel,” Ekan shared, “In fact, our customer success team checks with Unblocked first and only reaches out to the specific engineering team if they still have questions.”

This shift dramatically reduced repeat questions in support channels, and enabled cross-functional partners to move forward without delay.

“Our customer success team checks with Unblocked first and only reaches out to the specific engineering team if they still have questions.” — Ekan Subramanian, VP Engineering at Fingerprint

Fingerprint also uses Unblocked to ramp up new engineering hires. From day one, new hires get access to Unblocked as an onboarding companion. It helps them independently explore explanations about specific systems and workflows. Because of Unblocked’s ability to connect the dots across various sources, it explains the nuances like a seasoned team member.

The results were immediate. “Since using Unblocked, all of our new team members onboarded faster and are more self-sufficient.” Ekan notes, “This saves their time as well as their peers’ time.”

“Our team saves between 60-70 hours per week that otherwise would’ve been spent on looking for answers or answering questions from others. ” — Ekan Subramanian, VP Engineering at Fingerprint

The Outcome: Shared knowledge that scales with the team

By making Unblocked the first layer of internal support, Fingerprint dramatically cut down on disruptions across the engineering organization. Support channels stopped overflowing with requests. Engineers reclaimed hours each week that would’ve been lost to answering repeat questions.

Beyond saving time, Unblocked transformed how the team worked together. Engineers and non-engineers alike could unblock themselves quickly, without having to dig for answers or worry about interrupting someone. And when they did reach out for help, their questions were more informed and easier to answer.

It also sparked continuous improvements in documentation. “Unblocked helped us spot gaps, gather missing pieces, and update our docs so future questions are answered accurately,” Ekan shared. “The team as a whole gained more autonomy.”

“Unblocked is our single source of information across the company.” — Ekan Subramanian, VP Engineering at Fingerprint

During team transitions, Unblocked held onto the context that would’ve otherwise walked out the door—saving the team weeks of digging and re-learning.

“Unblocked was a huge help when we lost a lot of domain knowledge due to recent departures. It made sure the remaining team members had access to critical context to keep things running smoothly.” — Ekan Subramanian, VP Engineering at Fingerprint

As Fingerprint continues to grow, Unblocked remains an integral tool for scaling team knowledge, enabling everyone to work smarter, faster, and more independently.

If your team is growing fast and support is starting to slow you down, Unblocked can help. Reach out to learn more.