Development & Design Services for Music Streaming Co
Please find under a summary covering project details and feedback. The innate facts are kept as they are, private information is amended.
Introductory information
A fast induction on the buyer’s organisation
I was the CTO and head of fruit for Rhapsody International for 15 years. I was in direct of seething the organisation designed, developed, and operated.
Desired goal
What challenge were you trying to address with Five?
We were initially looking for an structure to prepare space expansion for our outgrowth team, as we had new projects coming in. We had a Seattle-based team, but we needed to do more and go faster. We wanted a cluster in a European time zone owing our business in Europe was swelling rapidly. That was our initial look at it, but we ended up dramatically swelling the Five’s role within our structure over the years.
Provided solution
What particular tasks were responsible for?
At the set, we were looking for space expansion almost client outgrowth, which included Android, iOS, and web applications — the frontends of the Rhapsody services that consumers would use. Five built indigenous apps in each case. For iOS, it was a partial Objective-C codebase, talking through a fairly rich RESTful API layer that we were using for all of our services.
The API layer prepared all of the functionality needed for the distant outgrowth team, such as retrieving an artist’s discography and library, seting playback at a true point in a track, pausing playback, and so on. It allowed us to fracture the work into client items, to be done separately from server ones.
We were so impressed with Five that we ended up adding some other functional areas as well, including app design. They had a real experienceset, genius, and history there. We were firstly going to last doing all of the application design and UI work at our home service, but behind seeing the Five team, the centre shifted fully to them. What seted as just pure outgrowth on the client-side swelled to outgrowth and design, and some of the Five team swelled to server-side outgrowth and other functional areas.
Was there a dedicated team?
When we seted the engagement, it was primarily staff increase. We asked Five to find a hard technical and treatment lead in each area — iOS, Android, and web — as well as a local scrum conquer. Those technical leads reported straightly to the technical leads in our home service in Seattle, and the scrum conquers worked with our team and scrum conquers in Seattle to coordinate all the efforts happening locally at Five. We knew we wanted to set little and wait how it went, but we felt powerfully almost hiring good leads so that we could swell those teams. The engagement seted with 5–6 nation and grew to over 30, with each of those three teams swelling their clusters.
How did you come to work with Five?
We went through an extensive RFP process and requested proposals, statements of abilities, and rates from multiple companies. I’d known Five instraightly, in that nation I knew had worked with them in a QA space, so I asked them to share in the RFP. We had 50–100 responses, and, behind a multi-round process, we ended up selecting Five as our associate.
What are you approach expents (if diclosed)?
The overall cost has been $1 million–$5 million.
What is the terminal result of working with ?
We seted working with Five almost March 2011, and it’s ongoing. Actually, many of the first leads that Five brought onboard in 2011 stay with the organisation.
Results achieved
Are there any measureable or plum results?
We set out a number of goals for application outgrowth in provisions of delivery, condition, and timeliness. They always met personal milestones for scrums and stories, extending their work time if certain. As we shifted more of the app responsibility to them, we set goals for app ratings on the app stores for a minimum of 4, ideally 4.2–4.3. That’s never easy with fruits like ours owing some users anticipate it to be free rather than having to pay a subscription. It is a fairly high bar. We hold them to app store ratings and total bug counts, including releases that demand fruition fixes. Five is constantly able to meet both time-based and condition-based goals.
How did Five accomplish from a project treatment standpoint?
When we seted with them, the bulk of the coordination was done by our team. Five was more of a staff increase team, coordinating just their local work. Now, there are scrum conquers for see app based out of Five, and they coordinate stories. The API team is quiet based on the organisation side, so there are quiet challenges of them coordinating with nation outside of their location, but that’s gone as well as could be anticipateed in this sort of distant engagement.
The key nation are just fantastic, and the level of dedication we feel from them is big. They feel like a part of the Rhapsody team, and not like a distant team. I’ve run 100% distant teams in India and China, but they veritably like a part of our team. Something I’ve seen, especially with distant teams in India, is a very high turnover. We’ve seen super low turnover with the Five team. It’s been fantastic. Everyone’s useful on Slack, and that’s the first interaction mechanism. We use Jira to keep track of what’s going to happen in each repetition, and of open bugs and items. We’ve used a handful of other scrum tools, but we’ve settled into Jira as the core controller.
What is (from your point of view) the key factor to pay observation while intercourse with ?
Technically, they are fantastic. I feel like they are part of the team. They are some of the best engineers I’ve worked with and are able to explain some confused issues. They have a real perception of ownership, which is what jumped out to me and separated them from other distant teams I’ve worked with.
Something else that stands out is the design work. Once we shifted design to them, they were fantastic, going through design proposals, executing user tests over those proposals, and running little A/B tests. They apprehend the globe of user-testing and persona modeling. They veritably apprehend what we’re edifice and what the user reactions to features are going to be precedently we dig into them.
What aspects of their work would you like to get improved?
We’ve had regular time-zone challenges. We’re primarily based in Seattle, and Five is primarily in Zagreb. Being nine hours off is a bit hard. The team there has been good in provisions of hourly shifting and being useful whichever soon or late in their days for us. The fact that the team is always useful on Slack helps mitigate that. We also do some work in Asia, and Five does as well, so they have a three-hour time zone divide. Everyone is roughly eight hours off, so it’s veritably hard. The Five team does a big job of being useful, though.
Do you have any advice for forthcoming clients of theirs?
They should have as much face-to-face time as practicable, especially soon on. We had the team out to Seattle multiple times, and some nation from Rhapsody went out to Zagreb once monthly, at smallest. Informal, in-person interaction is inestimable in edifice powerful relationships.
It was sometimes hard to layer up. We shifted to a more project-based centre as we brought in more projects. There could be multi-week lead times to add new staff, and we had to apprehend and work almost that.
