Tonic

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the General Manager of Greenore Port which is a subsidiary of the Doyle Shipping Group which is Ireland's Leading Shipping & Logistics Company. We provide port service solutions throughout all the major ports in Ireland and have been in business for over 130 years. I run one of our ports - Greenore Port, the only deep water port outside of Dublin on Ireland's east coast.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Our Port Agency service handles a huge amount of information on the ships that we process, most of which had been stored in excel documents, physical documents, and email chains. We wanted to digitize the way we manage ships, and build a system that can handle storing of information, automatic creation of PDF documents, e-signatures, automated emails, and a a robust checklist system that lets us track exactly what stage our ships are at.

We also wanted to integrate this with our financial system and scheduling system.

SOLUTION

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

We spoke to several vendors in doing our research, but none of them spent the time that Tonic did, to understand our business before making us a proposal. Tonic's small team was very hands on and we knew that if we encountered any issues or needed to change direction (which can happen with software) that we'd be in good hands.

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

Project steps:

• Information gathering calls
• Proposal presented & terms agreed
• Site visit
• Workflow mapping diagrams
• Build starts, weekly releases Deliverables were phased with a 6 week project (PDA workflow) specced up front, and the remaining system (which was based on the low fidelity wireframes) being built out and released incrementally each week for the duration of our engagement.

On the technologies, I believe they used Ruby on Rails but don't know much beyond that.

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

5 people:

• AJ - project manager
• Tony - CTO/Tech Lead
• Jenn - Lead developer
• Dinn - full stack developer
• Megan - full stack developer

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The project scope is very large, so we're still engaged in the build, but so far the deliverables have been of a very high standard. The software is intuitive to use - it doesn't try to be too clever which is important given the people who will be using it, and it reflects our business operations - it's rare that something gets designed or coded that has to be re-done because it misunderstands how our operations work.

There is the odd bug, but they test regularly and usually catch them before they make it to the live version, and they added a Live chat so that our team can get help or support directly from their team if they encounter something wrong. They seem very enthusiastic about ensuring not just that they deliver the software, but also that our team properly adopts it.

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

The project was managed in sprints, which varied in length. The first sprint was 6 weeks, and included all of the foundational work they had to do, plus the first feature we wanted to build. During that time while the developers were coding, AJ was also spending time mapping out the larger system and breaking it down into pieces so that we could plan out the larger scope. After the first 6 weeks, the releases became shorter in length.

AJ is the point person between me and the team, and we meet about once a week. Their team uses a concept called a "Minimum Viable Release" where they aim to ship a set of features/functionality each week or sometimes two weeks. I think they also meet every morning as a team. They track their work in Airtable, which I have access to but honestly usually I just speak to AJ. I also have a whatsapp chat with AJ where I can ask him questions as they arise.

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

1. The degree to which, and speed at which, they came to understand the inner workings of our business - there's a running joke that AJ knows the operations better than I do at this stage.
2. The speed at which they built and shipped new features (this started slow at the beginning but once they were running they would release a comprehensive set of features on a pretty much weekly basis).
3. The overall "no nonsense" approach they had: They don't spend a lot of time on formality-for-the-sake-of-formality. The team members all seemed very well able to read between the lines, so you don't have to be super precise with everything which can get tedious. Makes it a lot more enjoyable to work with them than other agencies I've seen.

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

There's nothing I can think of that's not standard run of the mill software/ bug related. They're very open with giving us access to their "work in progress", so the testing environment in the early phases had some stability issues and could be slow. But once we aligned and set expectations on that it hasn't been an issue.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the founder and CEO of Mustard - a VC-backed recruitment automation software company based in Dublin, Ireland.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We had been using off-the-shelf software but were very limited in what we could achieve for our customers, and we didn't have the full-stack product team in house needed to get our own high-quality product to market confidently and quickly. We engaged Tonic to take our ideas and transform them in to tangible wireframes, system architecture and most importantly budgets and timelines, so that they could then start building to get the best version of our product out in the market quickly.

SOLUTION

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

On top of being local to us here in Dublin, we instantly liked the team, and how they explained the unique way they operate. We had been speaking to other agencies but always felt that the way they worked and billed would likely lead to delays and surprise charges.

With Tonic, I saw their experience working within the software industry made them focus on how important it is to ship regularly without delay, and without sacrificing the quality of work - The most impressive thing was feeling like their team understood the position we were in, and had countless experience and success stories of helping others in the same boat.

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

We had come to the table with a vision for our value proposition, the type of user and their user stories, Tonic helped us turn those in to a proper product specification so that we could estimate timelines and costs, but also showed us a route to start developing almost immediately and get product in front of customers as quickly as possible.

We took Tonic's guidance on stack, which was Rails, Heroku and tailwind. Key for us ensuring that for every customer facing feature we built, we had a considered approach to building an internal management panel so that my team could manage as much as possible without needing a software engineer on all 24/7.

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

We worked with a dedicated full time full-stack engineer, as well as fractional CTO and designer work. We did weekly check in and status calls, as well as semi regular specification calls when our opinion and insight was needed. But the majority of the management was handled by them. We had a dedicated project manager as our main point of contact who managed the daily workload and made sure the product development moved at speed, and then led the communication of that progress back to us.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Not only on time and on budget, but we never would have expected to be able to start shipping customer facing product so quickly. Tonic's approach to minimal viable releases was a game changer for us, and we meant we could turn on product revenue 6 months earlier than expected.

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

Our workflow was organized and efficient. It suited us as we were so busy with fundraising and other business activities that we did not want to spend all day every day working with and managing every little detail of the platform.

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

Again it's how quickly they were able to begin shipping. For us, product market fit was still in question and getting the real thing out in front of real paying customers early, was a huge advantage. Combining that with how they made the process frictionless made for a pretty enjoyable experience.

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

I think if they hadn't been recommended so glowingly to us we might not have found them or believed that their company was producing this high quality a result at what was all-in-all quite a reasonable price, so I was glad to hear they are starting to be more public about the work they are doing through platforms like this one.