DEPT®

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

The company is called the Chernin Group. We invest in digital media companies. We do venture type investing but also operational control type deals. In this specific case, one of our portfolio companies, Barstool Sports, turned to Rocket Insights. Barstool is a media company focused on humor and sports for the millennial demographic. They created a site with podcasts, video, and written content, which they distribute to their audience. The work with Rocket Insights was all around Barstool Sports.

I’m a senior vice president.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Rocket Insights?

Barstool doesn’t have an engineering team. They hired one engineer in the spring who is a backend engineer. He came in and looked at the infrastructure and said this whole architecture needs to be rewritten. Their native app had been very poor performing in terms of latency, performance, stability, and crashing. He said that the backend needed to be rewritten but it wouldn’t have any visual change for the user. Our users would get better performance, but things wouldn’t necessarily look different. We challenged him to update the front-end. We used this as a push to say “Chernin has invested in Barstool and things are changing. We’re investing in the product, and we’re investing in the content and the people.”

The business goal was increasing user engagement and loyalty to the Barstool brand. Previously, no information was captured on users in terms of what people like to do, what they do on the site, who’s buying, who’s not, who’s subscribing - no CRM [customer relationship management] whatsoever in capturing information about the users and reaching out to them or re-engaging them via notifications or email newsletters. The second goal was around getting to know our customers better and being able to build that foundation for a CRM platform for Barstool.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Rocket was brought in to build an iOS and Android native app for Barstool and basically, rewrite them from scratch.

How did you come to work with Rocket Insights?

Our engineer said he worked with Rocket Insights before and that they had front-end engineers who could help us. So, we could pair him with them and he would write the backend architecture while they deliver a new front-end product. We met with them in an RFP [request for proposal] scoping phase. They had an impressive team. They got our vision and goals, so we felt comfortable going with them for the project.

How much have you invested with Rocket Insights?

We have invested $200,000 plus.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The results have been awesome. The app was delivered to a beta set of users in early September, which was on time. Then we pushed it out to the whole user base on October 4th. It’s been met with an extremely well reception from our audience. This audience is a tough audience to please generally. If you look at the comments announcing the new app, the Twitter comments, and comments on the site, they have all been extremely positive.

In this most recent version, 93% of the reviews were 4 or 5 stars. If you look at the comment section, which is usually a pretty negative space on their site, the new app was rated 90% plus positive. If you look at business metrics in terms of the number of new users added, it all went up. The number of emails captured went up. The number of people who have notifications on went up from zero because no one had notifications before. On the CRM side, we met a lot of our goals. On performance, the crash rate had been in 5% of sessions, which is extremely high. For the industry benchmark, you want to be between 1% -2%. Now it’s 0.5% a session. All amazing things.

How did Rocket Insights perform from a project management standpoint?

They were great to work with. They were always available. My role on this project was project manager from Chernin’s side. They were the engineering team. I’m in constant contact with their team and the team lead, multiple times a day. They’re always available and are very flexible. It’s a typical software project where you define the objective and use cases early, but things change and evolve as the project goes on.

What did you find most impressive about Rocket Insights?

They were able to roll with those punches. Barstool even hired their first chief executive officer during the project. When she came in, she had some opinions which helped morph the direction of where we were going with the app, and they were very flexible and responsive to those needs and to the new stakeholders. They had a high quality of work output in terms of what was delivered.

Are there any areas Rocket Insights could improve?

It was a great scenario to work with. I have no complaints. The schedule ended up slipping but had nothing to do with them. It was the company. They moved into new offices and a new studio, so they wanted to have that publicity out there first and have some time in creating content in the new studios before they released the app.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Virgin Pulse is a software provider for corporate wellness solutions. Our product is purchased by leaders of HR in wellness who are interested in getting their employees more active, healthier, and feeling good about the culture of their workplace.

I’m a Senior Project Manager. I’ve been mostly focused on our mobile software solutions. I’m launching a new product probably at the end of the year called Unite, which is a challenge focused product.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Rocket Insights?

One of our challenges in our space is innovation and trying to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. We saw Rocket as having that forward-looking vision of how to use technology in more innovative ways, which we could use to address some of our member pains and some of our client buyer pains.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We engaged with them a few times. Initially, a lot of it was on design vision around new products that we wanted to launch. We were working with them to determine the vision and the demo. Basically, determine what the product would look like and how we could begin to show it to potential customers. They also took the lead to bring our Apple Watch app to market. Apple Watch was really a new platform, not only for us but for the marketplace in general, so the goal was to make our customer experience shine on the watch and really leverage the watch to enhance our customers’ experience.

How did you come to work with Rocket Insights?

There’s a lot of people at Virgin who have worked with the guys at Rocket in previous companies. They’re really familiar with their work. For instance, Brightcove and HubSpot, had nothing but great things to say about their past work from a design and engineering perspective. Since we’re located in the Boston area, one of the key benefits is that they are just a short drive up the road from us. We’re able to gather at a whiteboard and brainstorm concepts much faster.

How much have you invested with Rocket Insights?

We have spent $50,000 to $100,000.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I don’t have exact numbers but we’ve seen an increase in our Apple Watch install rates. Along with that, our Net Promoter Score for mobile has increased as well. Once we launched, we had a big press release about the Apple Watch app, Rocket and Apple. We received a lot of calls from people wanting to know more about the watch app, especially how we designed and developed it. It generated more interest in our product in general from new prospects.

What did you find most impressive about Rocket Insights?

It’s great to work with people that are fun, smart, and flexible. They are definitely all of those things. They have a long history with design and working on specific types of design methodologies, and know the right fit for whatever engagement you need. So no matter how big or how small the project is, they can come to the table with the best process given your needs. For example, on our initial engagement of doing a vision redesign, we used one-week design sprints. Within those five days, we were able to come up with concepts, get them in front of key stakeholders, and actually test them with end users in order to produce what felt like a really great product.

Apple was working with us on certain dates when they were going to make some mention of our app at an Apple-related event. So we started with that date and worked backwards to meet every deadline to achieve that goal.

Are there any areas Rocket Insights could improve?

There’s really nothing I can think of. If anything, they may be a little too eager. I wouldn’t want anyone to work extraneous hours to meet deadlines and do things off the book. When they were getting started, maybe they were kind of scrappy in wanting to do as much as they could. As they grow, I think they’ll be able to address what I would consider some of their prior weaknesses.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a Software as a Service platform for K-12 education that helps schools collaborate around behavior and school culture to support a positive learning environment. I’m the Chief Executive Officer. I also lead the product team.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Rocket Insights?

We engaged Rocket Insights to help us conceive of and ultimately launch our mobile application.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We built an iOS app with Rocket. We’ll build an Android app probably early next year and likely use Rocket, but that has not been completed yet. Before we got to the development stage, we did a design sprint with them to go from concept to a clickable prototype in about a week and a half.

How did you come to work with Rocket Insights?

We solicited proposals for this mobile project from a number of different agencies that we reached out to. Rocket was ultimately the winner for a number of different reasons - competitive pricing being one. But more importantly, they understood the Agile approach we wanted to take to the design phase and the caliber of their portfolio of work was exceptional.

How much have you invested with Rocket Insights?

Our investment is in the range of $50,000 to $200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in March of this year [2016].

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I can’t mention anything yet. They helped us launch a mobile app for our community of schools and we are not yet ready to share the metrics around usage because it just launched around back to school season [August 2016]. So far, we’re trending in the right direction but it’s too early to say.

What did you find most impressive about Rocket Insights?

They are exceptionally strong communicators with both verbal and written communication.  When kicking off the sprints, I knew we were aligned on expectations because they proactively communicated them. They have incredibly talented designers who can very rapidly take an idea and bring it to life in the form of wireframes and clickable prototypes. Then, they can iterate on that feedback through the process of user testing and rapidly get customers to give feedback on the clickable prototypes. We’d never quite worked like this, but it was effortless and incredibly valuable to do so.

Are there any areas Rocket Insights could improve?

No. They’ve been exceptionally responsive to my feedback and it’s been overwhelmingly positive. We ran a second design sprint with them as an extension of the project and at that point since we worked together in the past I wanted to try doing a modified design sprint since the prescribed method is this five-day process when you’re on site face to face the entire time. We did something that was a little bit shorter and more virtual and didn’t get the same results - surprise - through no fault of their own but they were incredibly receptive to my feedback when I said we hadn’t really hit the objectives I’d hoped to hit but continued working with us until we did hit those objectives.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a biotech company. We sequence cancer DNA for doctors across the world and provide the results back to those providers.

My group is the Data and Technology Product Development Team. We’re responsible for building software and other data tools to support our work. I’m the Senior Director of the group.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Rocket Insights?

We were building a data analysis platform and a suite of other technology tools that we needed additional development resources for.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Rocket Insights did the design work up front. They helped lead a design sprint - a couple months of design work over the summer last year. Then they spent several months building and deploying an application based on what we needed them to do. It was a web-based application that was designed primarily for desktop use, and which can be used on an iPad as well.

How did you come to work with Rocket Insights?

They were highly recommended to us. They had a really great attitude about development. They were like partners throughout the process and they are standout folks.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The products we built with Rocket Insights serve our pharma customers, including very big pharma customers and major academic cancer centers. These groups have been tremendously pleased with the work and the products that we’ve delivered to them, which were built by the Rocket team. They are so pleased even to the point where some academic centers have even suggested that they may stop the internal efforts that they were doing because the work that we delivered was so powerful and beyond the scope they had imagined.

What did you find most impressive about Rocket Insights?

The biggest thing that distinguishes Rocket Insights is their phenomenal attitude. Their leaders are exceptional human beings and partners. They’re thoughtful, creative, and problem solvers. They approach everything with a can-do attitude and get it done. I feel like they’re truly invested in the success of their work and take pride in it. They’re contractors, but they’re not really working on a contract. They’re working as product partners, and it pays off.

Are there any areas Rocket Insights could improve?

I don’t have much. We hired them again.