Turtle

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for a Christian nonprofit organization. We help resource churches around the world to operate spaces where people can learn about the Christian faith. My specific role is overseeing our digital strategic efforts and innovation on our team.

What challenge were you trying to address with Turtle?

We were looking to create a distribution platform that we could use worldwide to help train and equip churches with both operational and promotional resources that they need. Our team was able to build an MVP that we could deploy in a few different countries, and then my job was to bring on a partner who could expand that to the 60 countries we operate in while turning the basic version into a really robust final product.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The product itself is a web app that provides a variety of resources laid out in a structured course, including training videos and other guideline materials that can be used to help support the churches’ everyday operations. Because we already had a version of the app in place, the backend already existed, and they served to help redesign and create new elements of the UX on top of that existing infrastructure.

Once the new features were in place, we ran extensive user testing with both mobile and desktop applications to help refine how we were serving our customers. We’re also working on a mobile version of the application and a marketing website to help people find the apps as well.

What is the team composition?

I worked with two members of their team who served as my main points of contact for all of the work.

How did you come to work with Turtle?

We had heard about their company through a friend of the friend and knew that they had insight into the nonprofit market that would help with onboarding into our organization. From there, we were really impressed by their totally product-focused user testing approach, and that’s why we engaged them.

How much have you invested with them?

The total cost of the work was a little over $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We first started working with them in August 2018 and wrapped up in May 2019.

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

Turtle just brings a really back-to-basics product understanding to their work and aren’t afraid to get messy figuring out what the product needs to do better and how to achieve that. Having a team that was really on my wavelength in that was incredibly helpful.

They also understand how to take an idea that we’ve conveyed in a workshop or a meeting and turning it into a concrete part of the product in a way that we could never have explicitly dictated to them.

How did Turtle perform from a project management standpoint?

Their team has been amazing and really fun to work with. They were on time for everything and really good at letting us know what they needed from us, whether it was content or user testing approval, in order to stay on schedule.

Operationally, the whole thing was very sharp and there was never a time where I felt unorganized or not on top of anything that we had going on. Having the dedicated project team really helped us to get into that process quickly and keep things moving as we went.

What did you find most impressive about them?

At the end of the day, Turtle is just a great partner. They are fun to work with, but they still take the craft of designing products really seriously, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to anyone. Their team is just the right size to balance resources with efficiency and are able to attack just about any challenge that faces them in a nimble and well-structured way.

Are there any areas they could improve?

To be honest, I really don’t have any complaints about the experience. As they grow, I imagine it will get harder for them to maintain the same small-team, casual feel, but I’m sure they will be up to the challenge.