Postlight

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the lead product manager at a digital media company that creates newsletters to help millennial women catch up on the day.

What challenge were you trying to address with Postlight?

We were looking to relaunch our website. We had new branding that we were preparing for, but we also wanted to take advantage of the moment by doing a whole UX overhaul. We wanted to improve our website layout.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have different pages that live on our website, including our homepage, article pages, and channel pages. Postlight helped us understand how each of those pages should be laid out to meet our general goal of increasing the time spent on the website as well as content discoverability.

They took a look at the overall navigation and boiled it down to something that was clearer to users. The team also worked on the structure of articles to improve the reading experience and to improve the ability for users to find new content from there. 

What is the team composition?

We worked with a designer, a product manager, and an engineer who helped our engineering team.

How did you come to work with Postlight?

We reached out to multiple vendors and Postlight’s structure was most similar to what we wanted. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with them from January–April 2020. 

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

Anecdotally, there has been a great appreciation for how the website looks and feels from a UX point of view. We’ve done some qualitative testing around it and have received favorable results. The functionality and reliability are high. 

How did Postlight perform from a project management standpoint?

Postlight delivered within the budget. If they ever went past a deadline, it was discussed ahead of time. We had a tight, almost impossible timeline to start with, so the fact that we were able to mostly meet it was very impressive on their end.

We invited them into our Slack channel and they invited us onto their Asana board, which is how we kept an eye out on timing and deliverables, which was helpful.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their UX design was very strong. The designer listened very carefully to our stakeholders’ requirements and concerns and was able to distill that down into different design options. 

The designer also pushed back on some of the requirements in a helpful way, telling us what would help the business more. We appreciate that he was able to push back and not just be a “yes man” for us. It was a very collaborative relationship.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing jumps to mind right away. If anything, there were times when it would’ve been helpful to hear more about the process that was happening on the Postlight side in terms of understanding how they came to some of their decisions.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Bring them in and assume that they’re an extension of your team in order to be successful because that’s what they want to be and it seemed like that’s how they worked best. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for Mozilla, a tech company that makes the Firefox browser. I do business development and work with product teams to help build new products.

What challenge were you trying to address with Postlight?

We were exploring a new technology and how we might apply it to create a better programming experience for developers.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We engaged Postlight to provide my product development research team with market research. We wanted help with engineering thought leadership around the product idea we wanted to explore. The product was related to Rust as a programming language and WebAssembly. 

Since it was a technical product that serves developers, we needed a very technical partner, so they brought very technical talent to the project. This enabled us to have very technical conversations with potential customers to better assess the viability and attractiveness of the idea. 

What is the team composition?

We worked with two people primarily, but I’m sure there were other people behind the scenes. 

How did you come to work with Postlight?

We’d previously worked with a market research firm who highly recommended Postlight as a development team. We reached out to them, had some initial conversations, and decided they’d be the right fit.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around $100,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement ran from December 2019–March 2020.

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

The project was really a learning exercise. Their support helped us answer a bunch of questions we wanted to understand related to the feasibility and viability of the idea. We measure success based on how much we learned toward understanding the market opportunity. 

How did Postlight perform from a project management standpoint?

They were very good communicators. Their team was disciplined and structured, which was something that we needed. The project was kind of nebulous and needed their structure, so they did a great job of leading the project and engaging us to provide course correction as we went along. They led the project in that way.

We mainly worked off Google Docs and we did video conferencing, along with some in-person meetings, too. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

The technical depth of their team was very attractive to us. Our team is very technical and we were able to have very deep technical conversations with them. Our world-class team viewed Postlight as peers, which was really impressive. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

For what we were seeking from them, they did a great job. It’s important to find the right partner, and they did what we needed. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I’d recommend partnering with them when you have an idea of what you want to build. They’re exceptional at actually building products and applications. Our work was very early in the product development process, so I imagine they’re even stronger at executing a fully formed idea and building a product. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of Creative Business Inc.

What challenge were you trying to address with Postlight?

I wanted to develop a new software platform for financial service providers.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Initially, we did a product design project to detail what the product would look and feel like. Postlight delivered a high-fidelity wireframe presentation deck, almost like an MVP, as well as a roadmap for the initial development of the MVP.

They helped me on the presentation side, including creating a lot of the talking points and organizing everything in a way that made it easy for me to present. After the design project, we then worked together to build a fully functional MVP.

The team also worked on the presentation deck for the MVP and worked with our branding team on that. Additionally, Postlight did the roadmap for the 2.0 version and followed through on updates and iterations.

What is the team composition?

I worked with two teammates during the design process. When it came to development, they had a 5-person team, which included engineers, product designers, a product manager, and developers.

How did you come to work with Postlight?

I had worked with a couple of other engineers, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. A client of mine introduced me to Postlight, so I met with Paul (Co-Founder & CEO), Rich (Co-Founder & President), and Gina (Managing Partner) and pitched my idea to them.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $700,000 on the MVP.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked on the MVP from August 2019–September 2020. We’re working on fixes right now.

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

One of the main milestones was that my team could get on the platform and start using it in its MVP stage, which was huge. We’ve loaded 70 clients onto the platform. Although it doesn’t have all of the functionalities, it’s a great product because we can see its potential.

They understood what I was trying to build at a very granular level. They understood the functionality and the vision behind the product. Because of this, they constantly surprised me with great ideas and additional functionalities that aligned with the vision. It’s been fantastic working with Postlight.

How did Postlight perform from a project management standpoint?

Their project management was great. We had weekly feedback sessions, and Postlight was very proactive and communicative.

They were also professional. I’m extremely busy, and the team planned the whole project and the cadence of the communication very well. We used email for communication, and they made themselves available throughout.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The way that their product specialist was able to synthesize the vision of the project and articulate that to the development team and then come back to me with such clarity was surprising.

The engineer who was working on the project cared about the vision, staying true to it, and making sure that they were delivering something that I wanted. The team took the time to understood why certain things should work a certain way, and they learned a lot about accounting.

Because of that, all of the functionality was built on their foundation of understanding. Postlight was consistent and able to assimilate new information and feedback quickly into the development. I didn’t feel like we were working against each other; I felt like we were aligned.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not that I can think of. They brought a lot of expertise and leadership to the conversation. If they thought something wasn’t a good step, they explained why and presented alternatives.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Utilize their product design expertise. Postlight is extremely innovative, so don’t miss out on the opportunity to work with their product specialists, especially if you haven’t done a major software development project. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I was the global head of editorial at WeWork.

What challenge were you trying to address with Postlight?

We needed to improve our content websites as well as bring them up to our new brand standards. We wanted the new platforms to be user-friendly from an editorial perspective so that we could publish content.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We went through a number of exercises to decide if the websites should remain as two websites. We considered which users the websites served. Postlight was involved in all of those conversations but they weren’t directing them. Their team gave us their best feedback about our decisions. Postlight helped me to advocate for a WordPress system because the company wanted to build it in another framework at one point.

Postlight dedicated an engineer and a project manager but not a designer because our design system was rigid. Our designer created specifications and wireframes to implement. Then, Poslight rebuilt the two websites from top to bottom. Their team not only built the frontend and backend but also article templates and analytics.

What is the team composition?

There was staff turnover on their side during the engagement, so we worked with three different project managers and Paul (Co-Founder and CEO) stepped in when necessary. We worked with one engineer consistently, who was beloved by our team. At one point, we worked with a designer who worked on two other web projects in our company. 

How did you come to work with Postlight?

I’ve known Paul and his work for years. I felt comfortable with him. I also knew that the firm had experience working with big companies and media companies. We got bids from three firms in total and Postlight was in a middle price range.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent between $500,000–$1,000,000 on the project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started our collaboration in August 2018, and it ended in February 2020.

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

The sites launched with a revamped content strategy, so the platforms enabled our growth in traffic and SEO results. For the most part, we stayed on target and on track. We tracked bugs and components that needed to be fixed on a spreadsheet and then Postlight addressed them. their team did what we needed them to do.

How did Postlight perform from a project management standpoint?

We check-in weekly for a good portion of the engagement. Sometimes we were a week or two behind, but the project hummed along. Communication wasn’t always the easiest because there was a lot of change. Our various project managers had varying levels of strength. At times, we needed someone who could push us and keep the project moving. They provided documentation in concert with our team. They kept track of their tasks and marked their progress.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Postlight was extremely attentive, giving us their time and energy. They were honest and weren’t afraid to say the good, the bad, and the ugly. Their team was on my side and worked to satisfy us. That helped me to be a better manager of the project internally. Their work speaks for itself. They’re an experimental, product-driven shop, which was appealing.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It was a challenge to have multiple project managers. Paul was aware of that. I didn’t have great strategists internally, so it felt like the project was all on me. The only way to get strategic advice was from Paul, but that’s not where they can invest their time. We needed more thought-partnership.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have documentation and schedule weekly calls. Make sure to integrate them with your company because their team integrates well. They won everyone over on our side. Also, keep the project simple because we had more options on the backend than was needed.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of an arts integrity consulting company. Our mission is to safeguard the permanence and integrity of the world’s artistic record. We carry out this mission through consulting and lab services.

What challenge were you trying to address with Postlight?

We had the opportunity to develop an exciting piece of software as a solution to a very specific need. The main challenge was that we’re a very small team with no in-house developers. We wanted to make sure we could deliver and ship the product, but also minimize the risk of working with independent contractors. Working with Postflight was a nice alternative to that.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Postlight primarily provides software and app development, but they also provide a bit of product and project management. The software is a layer of abstraction on top of Filecoin, which is a decentralized storage protocol. Fundamentally, we developed a command-line interface tool and restful API for simplifying work within Filecoin. It’s pretty complicated, and there’s not really any application built on top of it.

The app we built with Postflight breaks the files that users are storing into small chunks so they’re filed into small blocks within Filecoin. It manages universally unique identifiers and deals transactions within the File Coin network.

What is the team composition?

I worked with Pascal (Program Manager, Postlight) and Jad (Software Engineer, Postlight). There was also a design product manager on their end. This was great because it ensured we had somebody managing the developer directly.

How did you come to work with Postlight?

I’ve known Paul (Co-Founder and CEO, Postlight) for a few years now, not personally but through my following of Postlight’s work. For a time, I’ve been aware of their capabilities and also listened to their podcast. When I had just started, Paul was one of the individuals I talked to about which route to take in partnering up to complete development. Everything fell into place.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested between $140,000–$150,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our partnership began in April 2019 and is ongoing. We just wrapped up the second phase, and we’re hoping to sign on for a third.

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

Postlight has always delivered high-quality software reliably and on time. The solutions have always functioned as expected. There are some rough corners around some of the edges of the app, but it’s an MVP so it should be that way.

How did Postlight perform from a project management standpoint?

Their project management skills are superior. I can’t say enough nice things about it. Postlight always meets deadlines and ships on schedule. Pascal does a great job of keeping the projects on track and making sure we’re happy. We use Slack, Google Hangouts, and Zoom to communicate. They use Jira on their end, and we use Asana and Flow on ours.

Postlight has done an exceptional job of orchestrating our complex collaboration roles. On one hand, we’re their client; but on the other, they’re in service of our client. When it comes to our direct partnership, they’ve been very hands-on. They’ve taken leadership in making sure to ask all the right questions and effectively do their job.

Their team has also been great when it comes to their participation in broader meetings with our stakeholders. They’ve been extremely respectful and intuitively knew when to let me take the lead because the third party is our client. At the same time, they’re always there to step up when it’s appropriate for them to lead or present.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re authentically enthusiastic and passionate about this project — and that’s very important to me. We can tell they genuinely want to make an impact and aren’t faking the candor or friendship within our partnership.

Their team has expressed how they see the potential for our company to become a service provider. They’ve given us business strategy advice because they’re excited about the potential of our products. It’s very important to have quality, authentic business relationships because it makes collaboration more fruitful.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They’re expensive for sure. As a business owner, reducing costs has crossed my mind because at this point, we’ve de-risked and shipped the product and now we’re doing iterative work. However, I really like Postlight’s exceptional quality of work. Everything is fantastic, and they manage the projects well. Cost is really the only thing for me.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure to listen and be open to having your assumptions questioned or challenged. Postlight’s team has very seasoned professionals who do a great job of poking and prodding to tease out broader issues. If you’re more strong-willed, be willing to tap into their deep expertise and experience to really vet your ideas.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of Workers Benefit Fund. We partner with local industry and sector leaders to provide benefits to workers in today’s rapidly expanding gig economy. Currently, we offer benefits to 100,000 black car drivers in New York.

What challenge were you trying to address with Postlight?

My company engaged Postlight to build a mobile app with CRM capabilities.  

What was the scope of their involvement?

Postlight created a development plan and are in the process of building the iOS and Android app. The team used Airtable to develop the frontend. They built features like a news ticker and in-app texting and calling.

Postlight integrated Salesforce CRM. They developed CRM capabilities so that we can track benefits, utilization, and activation statistics within the app. The team also connected the CRM to our call center, data analytics, and all of our inbound and outbound marketing efforts, including social media and emails.

What is the team composition?

We have worked with an app developer, a UX specialist, two Salesforce team members, and various developers.

How did you come to work with Postlight?

A friend referred me to them.

How much have you invested with them?

My company has spent between $300,000–$400,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project began in May 2018 and is ongoing. Postlight completed work on the frontend of the app and are finishing the CRM. We have a roadmap for what we need to do next, but we don’t have a set timeline.

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

The app has performed well, and the number of downloads has exceeded expectations.

How did Postlight perform from a project management standpoint?

Postlight has been fantastic. They are incredibly patient with my team, which is not tech-savvy.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Because we don’t have an in-house technical team, we fully rely on Postlight to determine what we need and how to progress. Postlight ensures we understand everything they’re doing and what needs to happen, which is very reassuring.

Are there any areas they could improve?

From a non-technical perspective, they’ve done a great job and met our requirements.

Any advice for potential customers?

Be clear about what you want before building begins.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the editor-in-chief of Dollar Shave Club.

What challenge were you trying to address with Postlight?

From an editorial content standpoint, our web properties were incoherent in their technologies. We had a WordPress site that wasn’t able to grow flexibly or scale with the business as we grew internationally, and we also wanted to add domestic content platforms for our new locations.

As we got up to 300 million monthly unique visitors to our website, we wanted to be able to own that audience a little more. There were things we weren’t able to do from a data standpoint to actually understand who that audience was and what they were doing, which also led us to redevelop the site.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They built us a single platform CMS, from which we were able to spin up a number of sites. We have a website on the U.S. platform that is fuelled by the CMS, as well as a standalone U.K. one. Another of our sites is completely firewalled off in its own world. There are some light translation capabilities so when we expand to non-English speaking countries, we will easily have a good baseline of language for a domestic editor. They have also been doing some higher-level product optimizations, which is more tactical and foundational at this point.

They built it all via WordPress, which they advised us to use. We told them exactly what we needed in terms of architectures: a site that is lightweight, highly flexible, and can scale to a number of different countries. We mapped it out together and then talked about the kind of content we are producing and what the best solution would be. The design and specifications were the results of that collaboration.

What is the team composition?

We had a product manager as well as a project manager. We also had a set of engineers who did a lot of the actual coding work.

How did you come to work with Postlight?

We did our due diligence and talked to a number of people. Postlight came highly recommended to me from a number of people that I trust in the industry. The founder’s record speaks for itself as well, as does their client list. It felt like a good match for us, with their experience suitable to handle what we needed.

What is the status of this engagement?

Most of the work was completed between June–September 2018.

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

We knew all of the pieces we required and what needed to happen, but we didn’t have the skillsets or the people to put it together for us. Postlight did a remarkable job of understanding our issues and coming up with a suitable solution in a really timely manner. They filled in all the gaps that we had.

We measured the early days of the project based on what we knew we wanted. Everything is now an evolutionary process in terms of how we measure the results. A lot of it launched several months ago, and we haven’t had any issues whatsoever, so things were done correctly.

How did Postlight perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re the easiest people I have ever worked with—remarkably articulate and passionate in all the right ways. They’re very passionate about the work and the project, but they are also really good at assessing realities, needs, and other things. We really can count on them, and their dependability is great. I never once worried about their side of things as they work just as we want them to. If they run into any issues, they’re really good about bringing them up and having a constructive dialogue.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The way they carry themselves is really calming and rare in this line of work. They’re really collaborative and there’s not a lot of ego despite everything they have accomplished. They give their opinion, but we certainly feel supported as well—I’ve never worked with any developers that are so responsive.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They’re expensive, but you get what you pay for. It can make moving forward a challenge because there are some things that we want but are tough to at the price point. It’s much easier to do things on a larger scale project basis as we did.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

We knew exactly what we wanted, but I don’t think that’s necessarily needed—it would have been interesting to pose a problem for them, so don’t feel like you have to have all the answers. I think they could take an idea and show you things that you might not have thought of. That can really add value, and I think if we began again, I would have been less prescriptive as they’re great thinkers.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

When I worked with Postlight, I was a director of product management at a technology company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Postlight?

We had a fairly old, monolithic architecture with a very old application, so we wanted to refactor the entire system and build a new application from scratch. We were looking for a company to help us.

What was the scope of their involvement?

When we started working with them, we wanted to do some work on top of our existing APIs and move forward without rebuilding our existing system. However, we ended up rebuilding the application from scratch.

Postlight provided recommendations about the new architecture and built a brand new web application for us. They managed the frontend development and helped us with our API approach, which included integration with Apollo and GraphQL. It's a responsive web app that works on phones, tablets, and desktop browsers.

What is the team composition?

They assigned five developers and a project manager to us. We mostly interfaced with our project manager.

How did you come to work with Postlight?

We met with them previously, so we knew they had a good reputation. Also, we liked the app they built for a large magazine, so we decided they'd be a good fit.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in April 2017 and the project was completed in October 2018.

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

The application is the core codebase of an open-source project. One result of Postlight’s work is the ability for external contributors to easily get on-boarded and start working very quickly. That's certainly due to the quality of their code and the recommendations they made in terms of the architecture. The app hasn't launched yet, so we don't have a lot of data. The platform is being continuously deployed, which wouldn't be possible without their guidance.

How did Postlight perform from a project management standpoint?

We had daily check-ins and sprint planning. Every two weeks we had demos of the work they had finished. In the beginning, we were very hands-on because we had several teams working on the project. But they're true experts at what they do, so at a later stage, we could just give them the work and let them handle it. Also, I could call them anytime I had a question.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We could trust them to deliver a high-quality product on time. Our internal team has been very happy with their work.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can't think of anything. They're in a different time zone, but it was never a problem.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have an understanding of what you want to achieve and what problems you want to solve first. Also, provide them with as many details as you can. It took us longer when we had to make large architectural decisions.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of Software Product at Insight. We sell insurance through multiple distribution channels across 12 states in the U.S. and partner with a major auto insurance company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Postlight?

We have an online portal for agents who are looking to sell insurance policies through us. Quoting a homeowners policy, for example, can be difficult because there are a lot of questions involved, and our portal was out of date. We hired Postlight to update the code and architecture, as well as to freshen up the design.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Since that initial project, we’ve collaborated with Postlight on a number of both small and large projects, but they tend to take the same approach to working on a project. Once we identify a challenge that needs to be addressed, we work with their designers to produce a brief. Next, they spend some time interviewing end-users in order to understand what their needs are and to ensure that we’ve identified the correct problems with the software. They compile that data and return to us with a wireframe that we critique, and from there we move on to more detailed wireframing and implementation of solutions.

As an example of a recent project, Postlight helped us redesign the initial process of requesting a quote on our platform because our data showed that users wanted to have greater control and more efficiency. They built this out using React, which replaced some older JavaScript technologies we used to use. They also helped us add an autocomplete feature to our form so that we could capture more accurate address data for housing insurance quotes, and now they’re in the process of enabling an interactive map within the form so users can pinpoint missing locations.

Their engineers work directly with our internal team throughout every step of the project, which has meant that they’ve also taught our team new software skills along the way. When we started, none of our in-house developers knew React, and now three or four of them are proficient with it.

What is the team composition?

We work with five people on an average project, and across the life of this partnership, we’ve probably worked with 10 or 15 people in total.

How did you come to work with Postlight?

I had previously worked with some of the people who founded their company, so I was familiar with their capabilities and knew they’d be a good fit for our needs.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working with them since April 2016.

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

One of the design goals for the form redesign I mentioned earlier was to decrease the rate of failed address validations. Since we made those changes, we’ve been able to push down the number of failures. They’ve also improved our page rendering and helped optimize some of the code on our servers in order to further improve our speeds. I can’t think of any specific data points off the top of my head, but every project we collaborate on is motivated by data, so there’s definitely been an improvement on the problems we address.

In terms of the actual development process, we have a pretty rigorous QA team. Since Postlight works with us directly, we all respond whenever bugs come up and get those addressed quickly. Their developers have a very strong reputation throughout our organization because of how reliable and responsive they are.

How did Postlight perform from a project management standpoint?

We work very closely with them, so our management team usually has a good sense of how their work is progressing. They assign us more of a product manager, rather than a project manager, who really understands the work we’re doing and is an active participant in developing it. That manager is also responsible for communicating with us via weekly meetings and sending project updates.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I like their design focus. They’re not just an engineering shop—they want to understand the problem we’re solving and participate in developing the solution before they start to code it. Not only that, they’re focused on seeing the project all the way through to production.

Another strength is their top-notch expertise and willingness to share it with us. Even if certain members of their team aren’t assigned to work with us, they’ll still set up time for their experts to give my internal developers an overview of technology we’re working with. They did a two-hour session with us for a recent project, sharing not only explanations but also best practice advice based on their experience with other clients, and it helped jumpstart our project really well.

The last thing I appreciate is how they focus on building relationships, rather than focusing solely on business transactions. They’re accommodating to our needs.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm part of the digital leadership team at a global media company. I work on the business and product side, collaborating with editorial, engineering, and sales staff and our whole digital business infrastructure.

What challenge were you trying to address with Postlight?

We weren’t really a client, and Postlight wasn’t really a vendor. We worked with their lab division to create an experimental product quickly. We both had an interest in the product. Part of my role involves looking for interesting collaborations, doing experiments, and rapidly building small-scale products that we can learn from and monetize or expand once we bring them in-house. We wanted to test an idea and build a product together.

Postlight was a really good fit for us. We already had a relationship with a co-founder of theirs, and they had a Skunk Works division that could meet our needs.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We developed an app that functions as a Chrome extension and as a new feature within our company app on iOS. The core technology is the same on both platforms because, in the end, it’s actually a web app.

Postlight handled all of the production, but we provided the design guidelines. They worked as our engineers by integrating our APIs to make the app work.

Once we agreed on the collaboration, I met with some of their senior people for brainstorming sessions. At a certain point, we had well over 10 ideas. Some were way too big; some were way too small. We eventually settled on this experiment because it was a good match for our timeline and for the resourcing that both of our teams could offer at the time. Then, it was a matter of fleshing out the user story and product vision, which led to wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs while building the actual backend for the product, doing testing, looking for bugs and edge cases, and constantly iterating day by day.

We also had to tackle marketing because we wanted to launch this product publicly. We did an event together, I went on their podcast, and we did press meetings together. Then, we launched the product. I functioned as the product owner or executive sponsor. But, Postlight provided all of the product management and sprints.

What are the key features and functionalities?

We wanted to offer the power of our company to users by letting them bring our expertise anywhere online. If you’re reading a news story on a website that’s not from our company and activate the app, your device will scan the story and detect entities that are either publicly traded companies or notable people. Then, in a little web view, the app provides a list of those companies and people, allowing you to read our data and news about them. In Chrome, you can do that right beside the article you’re reading without leaving. In iOS, the results appear in a simple web modal, which means you’re not leaving the app to go to another webpage. It doesn’t hijack the experience.

How did you come to work with Postlight?

We had a pre-existing relationship with one of the founders of Postlight. When we first reached out to them, they’d recently announced their labs initiative. They were looking for small, experimental projects to do as collaborations. The partnership just made sense.

How much have you invested with Postlight?

The amount they gave is what they would bill for a similar project. We paid them an honorarium because we agreed that this was something we wanted to do together. There’s Postlight branding in the app itself. The work allowed them to gain exposure and hone their team. We were able to have a small product built that didn’t fit our in-house abilities at the time.

While we haven’t hired them on a retail basis yet, certainly our experience with them is helpful. Their lab is a place for collaboration where other forms of value exchange besides money are an option. I don’t want to speak for Postlight in terms of what they want from potential partners. With us, that arrangement works. I don’t know what they would charge clients.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in December 2016, and the project was completed in June 2017. Our team is going to take ownership of the whole code base and maintain it going forward. Now that the product has launched and is stable, we’ve reached the end. 

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

We saw some amazing tweets about the app. It was featured on Product Hunt and was covered by a variety of important and influential publications in our space. It got a lot of attention after it was launched. On the iOS App Store, there are no specific reviews for the product because it’s bundled into our existing app. But, on the Chrome Web Store, it’s got over 4 stars with 40 reviews. Most of the feedback has been excellent.

We just sold a sponsorship for the app, so it’s sponsored and driving some revenue for us. That sponsorship should go live soon. The product was featured on the Chrome Web Store. In terms of users and installations, it’s growing, and we’re happy.

How did Postlight perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re awesome. We set up a Slack channel to manage most of this project, and I acted as the frontline interface between our teams. In terms of project management and communication, everything was phenomenal. I couldn’t ask for anything more. They’re incredibly polished and professional.

What did you find most impressive about Postlight?

I’m wowed by their agility, speed, quality of the work, and ability to adapt to new developments. They were constantly pushing me just as hard as I was pushing them to make the product better and more ambitious, coming up with interesting and technically sound ideas for enhancements and solutions. They’re exactly the kind of people I want to build products with.

They’re a small, new shop and dealt with our large company very well. They were never frazzled or stressed. They always appeared calm and organized.

Are there any areas Postlight could improve?

I expected flawless execution, and that’s what Postlight delivered. We worked on this project for a couple of months. The work was very fast, focused, and contained. We controlled and managed the scope carefully. In terms of complexity and dependencies, this was a fairly straightforward project for them.