Enabling Product Teams

Background

A US-based company specializing in a proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning software, servicing customers across multiple industries. A small but growing company, their development department consisted of a few individuals working on code locally.

Challenge

The company knew they needed to scale their development team in order to keep pace with the growing number of requests, and they needed to move away from locally managed code to a cloud based environment that many team members could interface with. The company also felt that it was important to retool the process in which incoming requests were itemized, reviewed, scored and validated before they entered the workstream. They needed guidance from an experienced team who had performed this type of work in the past and who could empower them going forward.

Solution

Unista reviewed the existing product development cycle within the company, from how requests were sourced, to how tasks entered development, to how code was managed, and to how progress and results were communicated back upstream. The company already used Github for code storage, but they needed to alter their processes and make better use of what the platform offered them. We created multiple issues lists and project boards targeting different audiences, and created linkages between the 2 for easy issue tracking. We also created actions that helped move issues around the project boards and enabled automated code deployments. From a process perspective, we instantiated an agile development approach with sprint cycles and standups, as well as constructed a Git Flow the development teams could adhere to. Finally, Unista provided the distributed team to help the company achieve their business goals, all within this newly deployed framework.

Download the Case Study