RENDERRO: business support and agile product development for a cloud workplace for designers, filmmakers and animators

How we helped to turn the idea into the working platform, provided holistic business support, developed the product demo and put together a fully operational product team.

Summary:

Client

Renderro

Country

Poland
Project scope and technology

Ruby on Rails Development, UX/UI Design, Business Processes Optimising, Business Consultancy

Industry

Creative
Team Composition

1 Solution Architect, 1 Digital Designer, 1 Business Consultant, 1 Scrum Master, 1 Front-End Developer

Work duration

2 months

Renderro is a cloud workplace for creatives using the pay-as-you-go model. It provides a virtual work environment with configurable computing power that can replace traditional workstations. The solution is designed for audio-video creators, graphic designers and animators.

Challenge:

Our Client is an experienced film editor and they noticed that there was no service on the market that could "move" a workstation into the cloud to help film teams work more efficiently. And that is exactly the idea they came to us with and asked us to help implement.

What needed to be done? Except for the idea - everything.

From the presentation of the idea, through the clickable prototype, thinking about and fine-tuning business issues to the demo and the final product.

A big challenge was the pace of the project, the number of changes introduced and their frequency. We worked super-fast and super-agile because the product (at subsequent stages) was constantly shown to users who gave feedback. This generated a lot of changes, which we introduced on an ongoing basis in subsequent software iterations.

The cooperation with the client was divided into the prototype, MVP and product team creation phases, each focusing on different aspects of the product and business, but more on this later.

We didn’t have enough hands to do all the work, so we decided to collaborate with Ideamotive. We wanted to create a prototype that showed the basic concepts of the technology and the system design to aid in conversations with potential customers and investors.

Piotr Chomczyk

CEO of Renderro

Process:

In terms of technology, we focused on proven solutions: we used Sketch + InVision to create a clickable prototype for fast communication, feedback and making changes.

The demo front-end was created in Gatsby.js, thanks to its fast and cheap implementation, and the serverless back-end uses AWS Lambda.

The brain of the platform - virtual work environments - was implemented using AWS Workstation.

What was the process like? The first phase was to create a prototype and MVP. It was divided into several stages.

The first step was to create a presentation of the idea so that the client could consult with a sample target audience and collect feedback, primarily related to business.

Then we created a clickable prototype in InVision, which made it possible to collect the first feedback on the functionality of the platform, do continuous testing and make quick changes. The next iterations were very, very fast.

In the last step, a demo was created. Due to the small scope of the project, we went with the Kanban methodology, which was ideal for this purpose. The site was soon available online, allowing users to log in, check the conversion and test a sample instance.

The second phase - even more importantly - was to help the client to create a product team, allowing the client to implement the project himself.

Ideamotive’s project management process was a mix of scrum and Kanban. There was a project manager in place and the communication was quite clear. Everything was based on well-planned sprints that left little overflow work. Even though we made changes and reprioritized based on customer feedback, I can say with full confidence that we were on schedule with everything.

Piotr Chomczyk

CEO of Renderro

Outcome:

We helped our client turn the idea into a real platform with a business background and a working demo that allows us to collect leads.

Our quick development of the product demo version allowed the client to start marketing activities (including media presence), collect leads and further optimize conversions.

By validating the idea from the business side and preparing a product demo, the client could talk to investors.

Finally, we helped the client to assemble his own product team for further work on developing the product. We also supported the onboarding and helped design all the processes.