Case Study :: Online Billing Solution

Key insights
By using agile development technologies like Ruby on Rails Fourth Media was able to deliver a quality product that exceeded customer expectations.

Note: Client name is kept confidential becauase of NDA.

The Challenge

• Lack of any credible documentation
• Client wanted the same product to be developed further and launched in a very short period.
• Application architecture and codes were not up to standards.

Our Approach
Fourth Media team approached client with a ‘product analysis’ proposal in which the current product will be fully analyzed in all its aspects like product vision, market positioning, technical details and business rules.
A 360 degree review of the product was conducted by fourth media which resulted in many interesting findings:

1. There was a clear lack of focus as far as market needs are concerned. Product was developed for the sake of ‘features’ and not for the ‘users’.
2. Poor application architecture resulting in many security holes, repetitive/buggy codes. There were memory leaks in the application at many places leading to extremely poor application performance.
3. Lack of clear marketing vision and aligning the vision with development.
4. Extremely poor user interface leading to lot of confusions for the end user.

Fourth Media team with its deep insight in web based products came up with the idea to develop the product from scratch after clearly defining the product strategy, product roadmap and target audience. We offered very aggressive development timeline. The client agreed to develop product from scratch but the timeline was extremely demanding, 16 weeks! Fourth Media team accepted the challenge.

Before we even started with product vision, fourth media team studied key competitors and their offering. Facts from the competition and client’s own vision were combined together to create a realistic product roadmap. The goal was to bring an initial release of the software very quickly. We kept on adding/removing ideas in the roadmap and finally came up with what we called the most ‘necessary’ features for the first phase.

Once marketing strategy was in alignment with the product roadmap, development for the first phase was started. It took fourth media team just four weeks to show an initial demo. Although a much was desired at this stage but it went along with our plan to work continuesly with client based on their feedback.

For the next few weeks, Fourth Media team relentlessly churned out releases each spanning two weeks or less. As a result, the product was ready for a beta release in just about 16 weeks.

Fourth Media’s product development approach offered following advantages to the client:

• Client was able to identify a clear marketing strategy and relate it with product development vision.
• Strong relationship between marketing and product development was established.
• Restful web application development based on modern standards.
• Strong use of refactoring and DRY principles means coding was extremely high quality and bug free.
• Simple and easy to use interface compliance to w3c standards.

Client Quote

“I appreciate the responsiveness and proactive communication of the Fourth Media team. I am especially impressed with the quality and turn around time.”