Expertpays

Many companies needing IT product development or support in the US and Europe use native companies to initiate product development. There are many understandable reasons for this: no language barriers, nor cultural or time difficulties, nor a difference in legal requirements, etc. In this article, I will demonstrate how we were able to provide a solution for an American company and in the process saved more than $100,000 on IT development and support for their platform.

Briefly, where we started:

More than two years ago, we were contacted by a small company, Expertpays, which at that time was a new division of a larger company. Expertpays had already been on the market for about six months and at that time they needed to develop a new website and basic branding.

From the very beginning, Expertpays had three back-end developers to create its own portal that would store the data of all clients and information about the cases they were working on. In addition, external lawyers and medical experts were required to work on the cases, as well as exchange documents within the platform. Since the security of data transfer was very important for this project, the back-end programming language, .net, was chosen. Not the easiest and cheapest programming language, but it guarantees a high security threshold and stability. As there was no design at all initially, a simple template was used, which meant front-end developers were not needed at that stage.

When we became involved around six months after the start of the portal development, our brief was to support the existing product and develop new functionality.

Our first action was to reduce the staff of back-end developers from three to one. As the back-end specialist in our team has a Senior Level of Experience and is still employed full time on this project, we could leave just the one developer for back-end development. We also needed to improve the UI and UX of the portal, so we started designing…

As stated previously, we reduced the staff of back-end devs to one and we also added one front-end developer to the project to implement a new design (for the first few months full time, then part time). At the design stage, which lasted about a month, we added two designers (Web and Graphic).

Cost of developers in the USA: $100/h, Europe: $120/h, Ukraine: $40/h (with similar seniority and B2 English level).

Instead of three developers, we hired two (one of them part time) and even then we were able to be 60% cheaper than supporting three developers from the USA. But how could we achieve the same amount of work? The solution was process optimisation through effective planning and using developers only when essential.

What the issues were and how we solved them with the cooperation of American specialists and developers from Ukraine:

• Language. All our project managers and developers had at least a B2 level of English, which meant that they had a conversational level of English;
• Time differences. We held weekly calls with the client and agreed on subsequent tasks, so we did not need daily communication. But if an urgent task occurred during the working day, our specialists were always accessible. With clients in the USA, we are usually in touch at least until 6pm their time;
• Legal. We have an official representative office in the United States and Europe, where the contract was signed and to which payment was sent.

How we plan work

We use Scrum methodology. We hold a comprehensive planning meeting once every three months, during which we set a large number of future tasks. From then on, we break down the tasks into two-week sprints and release new features at the end of each sprint.

The client can contact us about the functionality of any proposed scale, which we will complete 100% within a given period of time.

We hold calls with the development team every morning, when we review the completed tasks and decide what to do next.

As for the client, we call them every week, to update them on our work and discuss current tasks. Usually we meet them on Zoom, in the middle of the client’s working day.

We were able to implement the first version of the site, which consisted of five pages, quite quickly – in just six weeks. As the first users were already on the site, they could learn about the company’s services, read reviews and learn more from articles and the FAQs section. This undoubtedly helped Expertpays accelerate its market absorption.

We started work on the branding around the same time as the site. Our design team has identified the main points that the company values ​​in itself:

– A new modern company competing with others in the corporate legal sector
– Working with healthcare and legal professionals
– Promoting trust and speed of work
– Using innovative work technologies

To begin with, it was necessary to analyse the entire architecture of the existing product. For this we used Miro. Then we added all possible future improvements to the product and drew a road map of the direction in which the development of new functionality should travel.

The platform united three types of users and we needed to enable communication among them: Lawyer, Planner and Broker.

Around 18 months later, the management of Expertpays came to the decision that it was necessary to update the site with new content and a new design.

The design structure of the new site has been updated; it has become more intelligible and concise, created with stylised Expertpays features and a block design. One of the requirements of the new site was to transfer users to the portal and registration / login to the portal in one site and one style.

The client entrusted the styling of the site to our design team, so we had a lot of room for creativity, although we had to stay within the branding of the company. It took us about two weeks to design a new site, and then we moved on to development, which took another month.

Here’s what we achieved:

In order to find new contractors and clients, we additionally engaged in cold mailings to Linkedin, which allowed us to increase brand awareness in several ways. And when it works in conjunction with email newsletters containing useful materials, articles from the site and video materials, it creates a triple effect.

Part of creating a successful online presence was to create a unique and recognisable company brand:

• Styling
• Business cards
• Fliers
• T-shirts
• Social media posts
• Articles