Emerald Solutions

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company is building the Tesla on Two Wheels, that is going to change the electric scooters market drastically. I'm the Team Lead and Lead Designer of the Marketing Team and I'm responsible for managing the roadmap and features that should be developed and published on our website.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Emerald Solutions, and what were your goals?

We had multiple challenges built into our product. We had an e-commerce product configurator that would allow our customers to configure, test and look over all the options of our Electric Scooter. Another big challenge we had was building our own crowdfunding platform for private and business investors across Europe. And lastly we had to integrate a unique single-sign-on tool that would allow customers to access different resources across web and mobile platforms.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

One of the deciding factors was that our visions matched, and we were going towards the same inspiring concept. We both want to build products that will change the world. Other key factors, were their flexibility, dedication, supportive knowledge and decision making. Whenever we needed a product to be delivered fast it was always the case, and we never were disappointed in the delivered result.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Scope of work: E-Commerce shop with custom configurator, with very limited delivery zones, and limited stocks per city per country. Crowdfunding platform from EU only countries, with KYC/AML, Transaction Processes. SSO across different platforms. Technologies used in the process, Django + Postrgess database, REST API, consumed by React Front-End App. With dozens of integrated marketing tools tools.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Constantin, Lead developer was our main point of contact that was managing the rest of the development process with the rest of developers. Team size varied from 2 to 7 people during different requirements and budget options. We had different positions but mainly, Front-End Development, Backend Development and Quality Assurance Roles.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

One of our key deliverables was raising over 3.900.000 Euros from open to public self-built crowdfunding platform. During our investment round we verified over 4000 investors and processed over 4500 transactions within 7 months of activity. Also on the E-Commerce site we've got over 700 pre-orders processed.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

It was mainly a Kanban process, with daily Standups within the team, and weekly recurrent calls with the Lead Developer. Besides every urgent request were prioritised accordingly and taken action on. Deliverables were mostly as planned and on time. Every possible delay was informed upfront, clearly explained and the reasoning behind it. For tools we used Trello, Clickup, Slack, Self-hosted Gitlab, Self Hosted Runners, G-Suite and all the work was done strongly coupled with our team.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Most impressive was the pace of development alongside the quality of deliverable product. The ownership and the source of information was great. On every request they had an answer, and if not they took their time to research the most valuable tool that could offer great return on investment.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Overall I'm extremely satisfied with the company, and the communication we've had. However when we launched the Crowd-funding campaign we had some issues with caching and bugs on the platform, but they were responsive and quick to deploy fixes as soon as possible.