Results
Single source of truth
Better collaboration across teams
Onboard new team members faster
Introduction
Revolve NTNU is a student-run organization in Norway where students design, build, and race high-performance cars in the international Formula Student competition. Operating much like a startup, the team brings together expertise across mechanical, electrical, software, and marketing disciplines.
Problem
Building a race car isn't just about engineering — it's about orchestrating collaboration across multiple teams, technologies, and goals.
Revolve NTNU faced three key challenges:
1. Cross-disciplinary collaboration
With mechanical, electrical, software, and marketing teams all contributing, alignment is critical. Teams needed ways to communicate across disciplines, track dependencies, and ensure knowledge wasn't siloed.
2. Managing complexity at scale
Each car is an evolution of the previous year's design, but new innovations bring new layers of complexity. Teams needed better ways to manage changing systems, from telemetry data pipelines to aerodynamics, without losing track of what came before.
3. Maintaining clear documentation
Prior to IcePanel, system diagrams were scattered across tools like Draw.io and Google Docs. Once exported, they quickly became outdated, making it difficult to keep documentation current and consistent for both current members and future teams.
"Typically, you have just an image you export once and then it stays disorganized. Some diagrams here, some there. It's scattered in the documentation. That makes it useless in a couple years if the platform changes."
How IcePanel helped
IcePanel provided Revolve NTNU with a way to standardize, centralize, and collaborate more effectively across teams:
1. A single source of truth for system architecture
By moving diagrams into IcePanel, the team consolidated previously scattered documentation into one place. Every system now had a dedicated view, ensuring that knowledge didn't get lost year to year.
2. Supporting reviews and collaboration
Revolve NTNU runs structured "concept reviews" and "design reviews," where alumni and team members evaluate system designs. Exporting diagrams directly from IcePanel made these sessions smoother and ensured a standardized way of visualizing architecture.
3. Evolving systems with context
Unlike static diagrams, IcePanel made it easier to keep models up to date as systems evolve. This is especially critical in a project where designs change rapidly, and every new car builds from previous learnings.
4. Onboarding new members efficiently
With the C4 model levels built into IcePanel, new team members can start at high-level concepts and gradually drill down into technical details. "When you learn a new system, you learn the concepts first… The fact that you can go into every system and find out how it's actually connected is really nice for new members."
Full interview
Read our full ice-breaker interview with Balin here.
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