Product Development Team for SageData - Business Intelligence Platform
Expertise Delivered
Industry
Our client,
SageData is a leading Business Intelligence (BI) platform that helps companies track, visualize, and manage their data. Based out of Berlin, they help their clients understand their businesses and drive growth by uncovering insights hidden in their data.
Challenge
As our client’s data analytics and business intelligence platform expanded in terms of popularity and user base, underlying unoptimized code and legacy features brought the platform’s inefficiencies and poor performance to the surface.
That apart, they were very clear on their keys to success- customer satisfaction, and rolling out new and improved features, including maximizing data security and compliance. Lastly, SageData wanted to act quickly and respond in real-time to the needs of their customers.
The client realized that the platform’s inefficiencies were causing users to drop out sooner, negatively affecting customer journey and business performance. Structural improvements, expediting platform speed, redesigning the pages, and creating streamlined workflows were some of the heavy-duty tasks that the founders of SageData outlined to improve their platform.
To help them achieve their goals, they decided to hire additional development capabilities - in the form of freelancers. And as in many cases, it did not turn out as well as expected.
In their own words -
"I got so frustrated with all the platforms like Freelancer that we looked at, because they all over-promised and under-delivered. It was months of frustration.”
- Kirill Andriychuk, Founder of SageData
Solution
SageData needed an agile, self-organizing product development team to work on new features for the platform.
However, given their experience with freelancers, coupled with a limited talent pool in Germany and Bulgaria, expanding the team was proving to be a major bottleneck. They also recognized that it would take a lot of time to hire, onboard and train a new development team from scratch; especially a high-performing team with all the required skills.
Time happened to be the one luxury that SageData didn’t have. Therefore, SageData initiated their search for a reliable product development partner, with a dedicated development team to start delivering on the product roadmap more quickly.
Our Sales team reached out to SageData at the perfect time, with our email describing exactly what they wanted - a partnership on the basis of an augmented team model.
In such an engagement model, our team becomes a full-time extension of their team. One of the key aspects of defining teams at Maruti Techlabs is around 3 core principles -
- Developers that have worked together in the past
- Developers that have the skills required to complete the job and more
- Team with a mixture of seniority
After initial meetings and calls, they decided to opt for our “try before your buy” model. As a part of the pilot task, we worked on a couple of integrations for their platform over the course of two weeks.
Impressed with our project management skills and level of transparency, they sealed the deal with Maruti Techlabs as their extended team of developers.
SageData started the collaboration by onboarding one engineer and then scaled the team to five people. Initially, the tasks involved working with WordPress and React technologies. Gradually, as requirements changed, the work shifted towards PHP, CSS, database handling, Python, AWS, etc.
Our rich talent pool of developers with a broad range of expertise has been able to help SageData fulfill business goals at each stage of the journey.
Some of the key features we built and shipped were:
Your product idea. Our engineering prowess & seamless execution.
Kirill Andriychuk
Founder of SageData
"We started with one and Increased the team to around five people. They provided us leadership roles with people who could oversee the project, as well as guide their experts from a strategio perspective on how to get things done. They have a project manager who would allocate resources at different stages: Maruti has a broad spread of expertise."
Communication & Collaboration
The client followed a Kanban task-based approach, wherein Dimitar Petrunov, CTO of SageData would share an overview of the features to be developed. Based on the discussion, our team prepared user stories outlining the tasks involved in developing the features. These stories formed the basis of the project’s tasks in the product roadmap.
The overall efficiency and a high degree of communication was maintained on the basis of water-tight processes. Our team had a strong influence on the planning and scheduling of the short term scope vs roadmap, which allowed the development timelines to be realistic and attainable from the very beginning.
Our team directly coordinated with the CTO and the team through Slack and calls. A dedicated Slack channel was used for frequent updates and instant query resolution. We used Jira software to track user stories and manage the project deliverables. Our emphasis on transparency and communication helped make the collaboration a huge success.
Technology Stack
"They’re incredibly good at owning a complete piece of work rather than just providing labor. They don’t focus on selling hours, but they’re very good at delivering results. They also take their time to find out what you’re looking for as a result and are incredibly good at expectation management.”
- Kirill Andriychuk, Founder of SageData
Our Development Process
We follow Agile, Lean, & DevOps best practices to create a superior prototype that brings your users’ ideas to fruition through collaboration & rapid execution. Our top priority is quick reaction time & accessibility.
We really want to be your extended team, so apart from the regular meetings, you can be sure that each of our team members is one phone call, email, or message away.
A perfect software prototype demands a perfect execution methodology. We follow Agile, Lean, and DevOps best practices to create a superior prototype that brings your users' ideas to fruition through collaboration and rapid execution.
