Background
Learnster is a Swedish next-generation learning platform, designed to help employees stay engaged while doing continuous skills development. From simple online courses to entire course programs, regardless of the learning approach, whether it’s classrooms, mixed learning environments or online.
Learnster initially started platform development with a different engineering team, but struggled to meet desired goals and timeframes due to teams “communication problems”. Trembit was invited to take over the project.
Challenges
The main challenges were not technical, but rather related to building an efficient development process.
Trembit was asked to perform next:
- Organize project transfer between Trembit and the previous engineering team.
- Build an efficient communication process between Learnster and Trembit.
- Continue the Learnster platform development
Value delivered
- Project migration.
Trembit managed to complete the project transfer in a 1 week period. We initially organized 3 engineers’ core squad. Now 2 years have passed and team has grown up to 11 developers. Among them are backend, frontend, QA automation, manual QA and team leader.
- Communication process setup.
We believe that engineers can be optimally motivated only when they deeply understand what is happening inside customer business. Each Trembit developer aware of the Learnster business goals, they know why it’s important to release on time. To keep track of the efficiency level, we’ve implemented regular performance reviews including 360 reviews system and self-reflection mechanism.
We love the internet but know very well that nothing can replace а face to face communication with a customer. The flight between Stockholm-Kyiv is only 2.5 hours and such activities as football or collective dinner together with Learnster become regular on a bi-monthly basis.
Other than that both teams have video conferences every morning no matter what.
Remember about 7%(text chat), 35%(voice call), 56%(video call) rule of communication performance!
Another important factor is language. Every our engineer speaks English, moreover, we encourage developers to talk to customers, propose new ideas and critique existing approaches if they can be improved.
- Ongoing Learnster platform development
While the team is busy with core Learnster engineering, new ideas and experiments come along nevertheless. Testing those, must not influence the main development of Learnster. We managed to organize an inhouse part-time backup team here in Trembit, in order to deal with side tasks when it’s necessary. As a result, we keep core development at an efficient rate and created an opportunity for continuous experimenting and growth.
Testimonial
Their proactive team gets things done as if it were their own project, consistently delivering high-quality outputs. Trembit’s handy suggestions, adaptability, and customer-oriented approach stand out, but what really differentiates them is their ability to deeply understand business needs.
Aaron Castaneda, Product Manager of Learnster
