We have had a really productive weekend at Expandify, and I thought it was worthwhile just sharing our approach to building the platform and working with partners to deliver true value to our end users and clients.

For anybody who has worked with (or for) a startup company there are constant questions around how far the story can be taken with the resources available today. There is an aspiration, there is the road map and then there is the practical reality of trying to build a complex product. Given that resources are finite, but also that we are fortunate enough to have technical expertise on hand, then our approach to developing the Expandify solution can only be described as agile.

We have an idea (actually lots of ideas) and we know some of the things we need to do to turn those ideas into a reality. There are boilerplate pieces of functionality around users, accounts, subscriptions and communications that we know we can make inroads with over the coming weeks, but the true value comes from the core functionality of the platform once you strip away the ‘normal’ stuff. And this is where agility really comes into play. Over the weekend we fleshed out a skeleton set of potential user stories that we think will add value to our users, they are currently written on some post-it notes and stuck on the wall. Whilst we have a loose idea about the priority of those stories (at least enough to get us started), over time we would love to have feedback from our backers, future users and industry experts to determine which stories will have the greatest impact and deliver the most value. Internally we have a very open culture and I would like to extend that to a wider audience as that feedback will ensure that the product we build is genuinely fit for purpose.

What else have we been going? Calling in favours – lots of them, from as far back as my memory can take us! Been in the industry for some time, there is an opportunity to meet and work with some fantastic people. I have had the pleasure of working with some great designers over the years and given that the User Interface and User Experience is so important to the solution we are building – to ensure that all users, on all devices receive an optimal experience – I have drafted in a few of them to run through some of the preliminary ideas for how the product should look and behave. Hopefully in the next week or so we will have some mock designs in place that we can show people and get some feedback on. Very exciting step to start to have something tangible to present to people and give them a flavour of the direction we would like to go in.

I am going to limit how technical this blog gets, but if you would like to find out more about our development methodology or our approach to building software and philosophies then please feel free to get in touch.

Kind Regards

Mark