Universalabs

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Engie is a utility company with headquarters in France. I work in the innovation department in Paris, where our main objectives are to build and enhance new businesses related to the utility company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Universalabs?

We needed Universalabs to help us with our online marketplace platform to connect small service providers with customers.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Universalabs worked on the first version of the online marketplace called Ajusto, connecting small service providers (or handymen) with customers. After the provider and customer connect, we take a sales commission.

We came up with the business case itself, localized to Romania at the time. We have continued to develop the service for four other countries across Europe.

From the idea stage, we worked with Universalabs on not only the development but also the creativity part, setting up the prototype itself. We had a scrum development process, with a new version produced every two weeks.

What is the team dynamic?

We were in contact with their founder, Bogdan Păun, for the creativity part. The team size evolved during the project; in the beginning, we worked with three resources. For 70% of the time, we worked out of the same office. 

How did you come to work with Universalabs?

At a certain point, we began to develop new digital businesses in Romania, at which point I began looking for smaller local companies which could help us with the launch of new products. We came across Universalabs, and started working together. We have worked with multiple providers, both in France and other parts of Europe.

How much have you invested with them?

The estimated cost of their work has been around €100,000 [$120,000], between March and the end of 2016.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Universalabs in March 2016. The first version of the platform was built in three months, after which we continued to change and adapt it, with a new version coming up every two weeks.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

As a manager, I constantly measured the quality and speed of their work. We looked at the velocity of the scrum process, as well as the results of the QA testing.

Compared to our experience in previous projects, the development was high-quality, with a low number of bugs. When there were any, they were corrected quickly.

How did Universalabs perform from a project management standpoint?

I didn’t let them handle project management. When I am in charge of something, I want to have control over everything, so I probably insisted on this too much and didn’t give Universalabs enough autonomy.

In terms of daily tasks and the ongoing business process, there were no problems. They were very responsive, especially their CEO, who I think always has a telephone attached to his hands. Since I also travel a lot, we also used Slack, Facetime and Skype for communication.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I appreciated the creative part of the process and found that Universalabs had a very good involvement in it. One of their strengths was the capability to set up a prototype starting from scratch and based only on an idea. Many companies can deliver a project based on precise specifications, but Universalabs brought in a degree of creativity at the idea stage.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could improve the optimization part of projects. There are several stages for every product—the prototype is used for learning customer requirements, and, as time passes, we need to integrate that feedback into the platform, and constantly optimize processes, making it better and better.

Universalabs was enthusiastic in the first phase, but, once we had feedback coming in, we found them needing to improve.