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Not hired one directly but I joined a team during the transition from agency to in-house. The transition took 3 months for us to be self-supported as the platf
by comprev 6y ago
Not hired one directly but I joined a team during the transition from agency to in-house. The transition took 3 months for us to be self-supported as the platform came with zero documentation.
Due to politics the MVP had 2 false starts at other agencies before the third company built it in a crazy short timeframe. The third company was only going to built Android/iOS apps to an API specification provided to them, but ended up doing the entire backend too.
The false starts were down to lack of clear guidance as to _what_ the client wanted from the agency and very slow feedback loops regarding progress. The first attempt was absolute overkill (and very slow velocity), the second attempt was nothing like the intended idea and development stopped after 12 months. Runway was getting shorter so third agency built it.
The biggest mistake was the client hiring a fresh junior as their first in-house developer, and them not having sufficient experience to identify parts of the platform that would become obvious scaling problems. Later on these became very expensive problems!!
- JohanCutych 6y agoThanks for sharing your experience! Just to understood, the team you joined was at what stage when they hired the agency? Like was it completely new startup that had capital but not enough man-power? How big the MVP was? From what I understand it seems more like full blown product that the company wanted to develop?
- comprev 6y agoA company which had existed in the digital music realm and realised it was late to the streaming party. The company was about 15 in size with zero tech people. I understand capital was raised exclusively for the MVP. The MVP being built was the foundation for a totally new direction the company was heading. The team I joined was the beginning of transition from agency to in-house, and we had to convert this scrappy MVP into production ready to handle 1000s of customers. The agency built a wooden bicycle which we had to convert into metal...while still riding it :-)