Productivity, Scheduling, Technical Recruiting, Web Development, Cloud Management, Dev Shop Management
"I brought Ben on as a technical advisor to my startup. At the time, we were working with a development agency to build our web application.
As a non-technical founder, Ben was a huge asset to me. He helped me look under the hood at the work that was being done, and also helped me screen FTE technical candidates and close our first technical hire (our Founding Engineering Lead).
Ben was great to work with and I would highly recommend him to anyone who is looking for independent, thoughtful and considerate technical advice at startup speed."
Arrange is a consumer productivity platform. It's a new way of using the calendar as a medium for personal growth and fulfillment. By subscribing to curated lists of tasks and events, users can discover new opportunities, track their progress, and celebrate their achievements.
Arrange worked with a development shop to build their platform at its inception, but they were experiencing significant challenges with their development process. As a result, progress on the platform had very low velocity; features took a long time to ship, deployment was slow, and when features eventually shipped, they were buggy and did not match expectations. Arrange management needed help, but they were unsure how to improve their development process; their skillset was in product design, not software development.
Arrange brought in Wilder Innovation to help righten the ship. We started by analyzing their development process, and it quickly became apparent that they needed to make changes. The development shop they were working with needed to deliver quality code, and the lack of quality was causing significant problems for the platform.
The first order of business was to pare down the scope of their feature requests into smaller, manageable pieces that the contractors could deliver incrementally, allowing for more frequent deployments and faster feedback loops.
We then helped establish best practices such as continuous integration and delivery, including automated testing and establishing code review processes. These changes prevented future releases from having issues and ensured code quality was up to par with industry best practices. We also assisted with code reviews to ensure quality was consistent throughout development.
After some time, we helped Arrange to build their full-time software engineering team and onboarded them into the codebase. Having an in-house team allowed for aligned incentives and increased velocity, as they had dedicated resources that were fully invested in the platform's success.
Our engagement with Arrange significantly impacted their software development and delivery processes. We were able to improve code quality and velocity dramatically. The incremental delivery of features allowed for faster feedback loops and more frequent deployments, which helped to build trust with their users. The continuous integration and delivery practices with automated testing and code review processes helped prevent future production issues, allowing Arrange's management to sleep well at night.
Wilder Innovation was able to help Arrange to improve its development process and achieve its vision of converting inspiration into action. By establishing best practices and building a dedicated engineering team, we were able to help Arrange dramatically improve their velocity and code quality, which resulted in a better product and increased revenue.
