Heap's engineering team utilized the union-find data structure to significantly enhance their platform's performance, achieving a 15x speed increase in a critical data processing task. By employing union by hash, a heuristic more suited for distributed environments, and implementing path compression, they optimized the way user data is connected across devices for their Identity API. This led to a drastic reduction in their data export process from four hours to ten minutes. The transformation involved moving complex SQL logic to a dedicated service built in Go, which improved memory allocation and processing speed, avoiding the previous SQL query's slowdowns and failures. This initiative was completed swiftly during Heap's Hack Week, emphasizing the potential of textbook algorithms for practical, impactful improvements in software engineering.