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.
Rocket Insights handled last-minute requests and unforseen problems with confidence. The team responded quickly to questions, devoted long hours to fixing problems, and delivered an effective, bug-free solution. Their enthusiasm made the project both easy and enjoyable.