Case Studies
Metaphor
Metaphor was born out of a strategy execution consulting practice with decades of experience helping companies achieve authentic employee engagement. Metaphor was interested in building a suite of digital offerings to help executives collaborate and align on strategic decisions and communicate strategy with employees and engage them in the process.
The Challenge:
The founder of Metaphor previously had a poor experience with outsourcing their development to India. There was an apparent need to remediate the MVP that was initially built and increase the robustness of the overall product. Metaphor sought to maximize budget and satisfy their need for a long term developer solution.
Solution:
Metaphor came to Menlo Innovations to help migrate their application onto a more firm foundation while addressing their initial needs of increasing robustness. In order to satisfy their need for a long term solution, Menlo Innovations introduced EC Group after having success in past partnerships. Menlo helped EC Group scale up a development team. Over a period of time pairing with Menlo, the EC Group team transitioned in and fully took over the development process established by Menlo.
Summary:
As a part of this engagement, Menlo introduced Metaphor to a simple, clear and proven system for managing software development projects successfully that emphasizes prioritizing work to align with business needs. This system allowed Metaphor to have transparent control over the project while achieving predictable outcomes.
Menlo collaborated with the original development team to transition the code base over and was then able to remediate the project, fixing the existing bugs and re-architecting aspects of the application to support Metaphor’s goals. Menlo implemented development practices like Test Driving Development (TDD) and pair programming to help ensure the quality of the end result.
Being a bootstrapped startup, Metaphor needed to maximize their runway for building the product and getting it to their end users. When they approached Menlo with this constraint, Menlo introduced them to EC Group due to Menlo’s previous successful experience transitioning teams with EC Group. Menlo participated in interviewing, onboarding, and coaching EC Group developers, introducing them to the code base, architecture, and software management system
Result:
EC Group was able to staff a full development team that adopted the Menlo practices for building out the product. The result has been a team of 17 developers that have since built multiple products for Metaphor. Using EC Group and The Menlo Way has enabled them to scale the team quickly while maintaining development output. Additionally, the EC Group team has helped the Metaphor team learn new technologies that have resulted in faster development and a more robust product for Metaphor’s users.
