Building effective management and development processes for a discount service

Kupikupon.ru is an online service that promotes goods and services through coupons and discounts. In 2010, Veritas Financial Europe invested $6 million in the project for further development, and Kupikupon grew into a large digital product. For Evrone, this was one of the projects that influenced the development of our company, values, and approaches.

The task

Kupikupon management contacted us to build their development processes and create several important features. They were attracted, not only by our experience, but also by our approach to management, which they later used within their own team.

The solution

We helped Kupikupon with the development of new MVP features, built the necessary processes for the digital coupon platform development, assisted with management of their team, and also helped to interview and hire in-house specialists.

Meeting the team and establishing communication

Our interaction began when Kupikupon was looking for a new technical director for their team. One of the candidates they found was Evrone’s CEO, Oleg Balbekov. They felt that he had the right technical expertise and experience in management. However, as an alternative, Oleg suggested a CTO as a service approach. They would hire our team as outsourced specialists, and we would provide them with management consulting, along with the development.

First, we conducted personal interviews where we discussed the role of each team member, as well as their wishes and views on development.

Together with the client's project management, we developed approaches to task management, built an iterative approach, rethought feature prioritization processes, and launched planning and agile software development cycles.

Along with implementing SAFe and making other improvements in development methodologies, we held several team building meetings in an informal setting. These meetings served to develop a trusting environment to discuss emerging difficulties.

As a result, we managed, not only to set up feature-driven development cycles, but also to strengthen the team and their level of involvement, ensuring that they would continue to have well-integrated product team roles and responsibilities.

Setting up the development and reworking the infrastructure

In addition to communication tools, we participated in development management. At that time, the product was just moving from an early version to a large solution, so some tools were not fully used or not used at all. We had to add or improve the:

• monitoring system
• code quality control system
• automated testing
• continuous integration system

Not only did we make life easier for the development team, but we also helped implement some good feature prioritization techniques for startups, which improved release management and accelerated the delivery of features to the product. In addition to development processes, we took up the security and configuration of the backup system and optimization of server capacities. This was necessary, since the product was preparing for serious scaling and would be required to provide sufficient reliability.

Helping to hire a new team

When all the main processes were set up, we began to transfer the product to the internal team for further development. We organized the interviewing and hiring of new developers, finding them new specialists and ensuring that they could easily pick up the development process where we left off.

Within a few months, we replaced all of the Evrone engineers with an in-house product team, and they took over the project without any problems.

The result

Thanks to our work, Kupikupon was able to continue its development without any pauses or failures in the delivery of new features.

This project helped us to define our principles, for which many clients hire us today, including:

• Complete transparency of processes. Our clients can check the status of any tasks at any time, check hourly reports, or get feedback from developers.
• Honesty and openness. We are willing to talk about complex issues, like problems in the code or bad decisions in the infrastructure, if the problem will put the client's business at risk.
• A balance between efficiency and experimentation. New technologies are good, but we will always discuss concerns and offer to take the familiar route if the solution that the client wants to apply is yet unexplored.
• Involvement in tasks. We always keep a comfortable distance, but we are ready to work in such a way that there will be no discernable difference between your own team and our developers.

We’ve since completed many projects with similar technology stacks and development processes, and this has provided us with the expertise to see projects from different angles and identify weak points.

If you are looking for a team that will, not only handle the software development, but also bring an effective culture and useful tools, leave a message and we will contact you to discuss your product.