Fragaria

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO and founder of Winding Tree. It’s a nonprofit foundation supporting the development of a decentralized platform for the travel industry. We’re a startup entering our third year.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Fragaria?

We were looking to build a development team with skilled Blockchain developers.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Fragaria wasn’t hired for one specific product build. We worked collaboratively and started with R&D. Then, we looked at the product we had built to that point and determined its performance as well as what needed to be done moving forward.

Their team helped to build a developer experience portal. The platform was meant for other developers to build on top of it. They built some main parts of the system and assisted with our blog, posting monthly developer recaps. We learned Blockchain technology together in order to build and develop the product. I was responsible for figuring out the architecture of the solution.

What is the team composition?

There were 2–3 people working with us. One of them did part-time project management as well as development.

How did you come to work with Fragaria?

I was familiar with some of their team members for a while. They came highly recommended for their skills in Python and JavaScript development. They weren’t experienced in Blockchain, but we hired them because they were very skilled developers.

How much have you invested with them?

We invested between $50,000–$200,000; it was roughly $100,000 a year.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from January 2018–June 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The project went well, and we enjoyed working together. We combined experience and skills together to work with the Blockchain technology as desired. Our team is introducing new things to an industry that’s very big and stable.

The ideal metric is for people, or companies, to use the system. It’s a long-term journey for that to happen, and we’re still early in the process. We gained the interest of more potential investors by publishing what we were working on with Fragaria. Our team organized a couple of events during the project, which were well-received by the community.

How did Fragaria perform from a project management standpoint?

They assigned a person to handle project management. This individual made weekly calls, created product descriptions, provided updates, and handled syncing — this made everything easier for us. Any deadlines that weren’t met were a result of a group effort, not necessarily their fault.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Fragaria was a great partner to work with. They brought experience and good skillsets to the project.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m currently a product owner in wealth management at Czech Savings Banks, one of the biggest in the country. At the time of the collaboration with Fragaria, I was the lead of the advanced technologies and prototypes team. My scope included the development of a mobile app called Poketka.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Fragaria?

In 2015, we developed a brand-new strategy and scope called “My Healthy Finances.” We were developing an experimental MVP with the aim of guiding our clients toward brand-new healthy habits. The first was getting control of their expenses, and the second was to pay contactless. It was a MVP-driven agenda, and at the time, there was no Apply Pay or Google Pay.

We had a few internal development capabilities, but not enough. Having an external partner was a logical step. Another factor was that we needed to have senior mobile developers with experience in multiple projects.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

It was a long journey, and the time to market was extended due to many different reasons. For a long time, it wasn’t known whether we could do business with VISA or Mastercard. During this time period, Fragaria helped us develop the application, mockups, and a plug-in framework.

The idea was not to have another wallet with some loyalty programs. We wanted the ability to bring third-party partners into our wallet.

Poketka is a cashback app with an online payment feature. The popular third-party collaborations and content of the app are being used in a heavy end-to-end banking app called George Klíč. It’s Android-only, and George Klíč is available on Android and iOS.

We set up virtual cards for one user only, in order to eliminate the need for entering the actual card number on different e-commerce stores. The user can set up virtual cards for this one purpose, and after purchasing an item, it will be turned off.

The user can have all their plastic cards in a virtual list inside the app, including for retail shopping. They’re able to have a real-time overview of their mobile payments.

What is the team composition?

Fragaria provided full-stack developers, analysts, and architects. I was the team lead at the time, but there were some changes in terms of project manager and product owner. I was in touch with several developers and key account managers, and I mainly communicated with the product owners involved in the day-to-day development.

How did you come to work with Fragaria?

In my last role, I was a bit of a community builder and spent a lot of time on meetups, not just as a consumer but also as an organizer. I met a couple of people from Fragaria at those events, and we stayed in touch. We discussed what we might do together, and I agreed to build the MVP with them.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost of their services across our collaboration was between $3 million– $4 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Fragaria in July or August 2016, and the app launched in March or April 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We were delighted with the skills of Fragaria’s team. For the first two years, they were almost like a business partner. We worked together to determine what the next big feature might look like, and what the actual feature would be.

Poketka is still up and running today. It can be downloaded on Google Play, and it’s currently being used as a prototyping platform. The loyalty cashback component that was successfully developed and integrated into Poketka is currently integrated into  George Klíč.

A lot of smaller and bigger features are still in development. We do A/B validation testing with users, and we’re carefully watching how much attention users pay to the new features. After we reach a break, the features will be removed, shifted, or copied into  George Klíč.

From my perspective, the main success of the app is not the number of users, but that it’s the first mobile solution of its kind in terms of functionalities and vision. It helped us a lot in the field of mobile development, store platforms, and programming languages. We received a fresh perspective on what mobile paying could mean, and we brought those to the big bank platform.

How did Fragaria perform from a project management standpoint?

The project management was officially on our side, and there were five or six changes during the development.

Fragaria’s team were and still are pretty agile. We used Slack for communication, and we all worked remotely. They were semi-autonomous, so there was no need to pester the developers.

We were developing a third-party store functionality in Poketka. I thought about if we got enough third-party plug-ins in the app, we would need some filtering based on user interests. Fragaria gave us this feedback, and we codesigned the functionality.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Most developers would’ve been pessimistic or scared to take on crazy ideas, but Fragaria’s team was open-minded. They have a lean approach and can-do attitude. There were internal struggles within our company, and the project ran longer than anticipated. It’s hard to stay positive sometimes and focus on delivering the best product for customers.

Poketka was a native mobile application made by people who love mobile technologies, rather than a centrally-developed mobile app with limitations and compromises.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a product owner at a banking house in the Czech Republic.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Fragaria?

We were looking for a new strategy for implementing the frontend part of our application and needed some expertise in this area.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Fragaria provided frontend development on the AngularJS framework, along with Bootstrap, for some visual parts of the frontend agenda. Upon delivering this project, we established a contract for maintaining the frontend stack. We explored some other options for this frontend agenda, like React and Vue.js, but AngularJS is still the best fit for our requirements. Fragaria helped us explore those alternatives.

The original project was focused on strategy and architecture decisions, and Fragaria acted as an architect and designer from the very start of the project, and next moved to a development role. They’ve acted as API designers and frontend developers on various projects. They implemented a particular solution based on Elasticsearch. They also handled design and implementation.

What is the team composition?

We worked with nine people.

How did you come to work with Fragaria?

We’d made an RFP for a particular project in 2013, and kept them in our company’s vendor list. When we started looking for a partner for the implementation of our frontend strategy, we sent them some requirements and a standard RFI.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent 7 million Czech crowns (approximately $275,000 USD). 

What is the status of this engagement?

We chose them as a vendor in June or July 2015 and started the implementation in August of that year. The collaboration is ongoing. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Fragaria helped us define a new strategy for our frontend, and they pushed us toward Elasticsearch. We were still using some server-side rendering technologies like Java Bucket or ASP.NET. That was pretty new for us, and their knowledge was really helpful.

Another important point was their help with changing our delivery method. We started with waterfall, which was standard in those days for us, and they moved us to an agile methodology for delivery. That was a helpful step because we needed to create some prototypes, which would’ve been more complicated to do in waterfall.

How did Fragaria perform from a project management standpoint?

We had a pretty close collaboration, and it was organized like a body shop. Members from Fragaria worked on the project directly, and there were no issues with deliveries from them. They also have scrum master roles, helping us deliver projects.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I come from a banking and corporate background, and I find their passion for new things to definitely be different from the approach of our company. This is what made working with them great. They have a more relaxed approach, with fewer set rules, which made working with them comfortable for me.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I haven’t had any problems with their expertise. They always delivered, and they were able to learn something new every time. They were also able to train us in new things, showing patience toward our corporate environment.