Case Study: How We Created OfficeTogether’s MVP In 4 Weeks

“I need this demo in 4 weeks, and it has to be functional and match our mockups. Can you do it?”

Normally if developers hear this sort of timeline, they run for the hills, away from the client’s unrealistic expectations. But when we heard this from Amy Yin, we knew it was different. Amy’s startup, OfficeTogether, had an opportunity to seize — and we could help her do it.

What Is OfficeTogether?

The idea for OfficeTogether was born in 2020 out of a new need for companies to make work more flexible while still being productive. OfficeTogether would provide scheduling and reservation software for virtual and hybrid offices that could track attendance and capacity and coordinate events.

An Opportunity

While developing the idea and design for OfficeTogether, Amy showed it to some potential customers as solutions for their hybrid work struggles. They were excited by the idea — so excited that they said they had a need for the software, and soon. Would the software be ready in a month?

Amy thought quickly: this was an opportunity to capture interested users before competitors could launch similar software. However, all she had was an internal designer. If she was going to create an MVP in 4 weeks, she needed a team of developers. She knew about Amplified, so she contacted the team and told us about her situation. We decided to accept the challenge.

Working With The Team: Challenges and Wins

Starting work was a challenge, and not only because of the ticking clock. With Amy in San Francisco and our team mostly based in Romania, the first thing we had to address was communication. Amy stayed up late on several nights to meet with the team in their mornings (though the hour did make it easy for her to focus, she says, with no competing meetings, messages, or tasks).

The first order of business was to get the entire team on OfficeTogether’s Slack. Slack made it easier to communicate about different features and aspects of the MVP with the relevant team members. The Amplified team could provide daily stand-ups and summaries of their progress. Additionally, Amy and the team would have calls 2–3 times a week, to get properly aligned and stay that way.

Amy was very technical and knowledgeable about the process, having studied computer science at Harvard and worked as a software engineer for over a decade. “The team were very open to direction,” she says, “and they rose to the occasion with this project.”

Working with someone who understood the technicalities was an asset with such a short timeline. Amy and our team quickly found common ground and communicated well. Serving as CTO for the project, she helped us move quickly by making suggestions about different tools she was familiar with and involving herself in each aspect of the project, while also trusting the team to deliver.

The Demo

As for the process of building the demo itself, the focus was on creating a clean and functional product in a short period of time. Amy’s designer gave us mockups of the design, and we had to comply with them with few changes and meet their expectations. Amy and the team established what needed to be functional and what could be hardcoded, and we got to work.

In the first week, we managed to produce a demo that was already functional, though not ready to use. Because of the timeline, we pinpointed the fastest actions we could take and prioritized those. We took full advantage of using pre-established components and libraries whenever available to create the different elements and worked on the elements that needed the least amount of work, all to maximize our efficiency while not sacrificing the functionality.

In the second week, the demo was integrated well. Our concerns were on the user interface side more than anything as we worked to make it look clean. The calendar was also a struggle for a time, and this was a key aspect of the demo.

At the end of 4 weeks, we delivered a functional demo to Amy and OfficeTogether. The site was “pixel-perfect,” according to Amy, as it resembled the mockup almost exactly, even with the use of libraries. “They also built a strong front end,” Amy shared. “It was a success.”

Amy was able to present the demo to her potential customers, and a week later, OfficeTogether was live, ahead of any competitors.

A Long-Term Relationship

Just because the MVP was done, didn’t mean our relationship with OfficeTogether was over — Amplified believes in not just delivering, but becoming a part of a startup’s team as a true partner. After the site went live, the 3 developers who had been working with Amy on the demo stayed on to work with her team, eventually expanding from 3 to 8 to meet all their needs.

Aside from their normal duties, the Amplified team also assisted Amy in building her internal team of developers over the course of 2020 and 2021. Some team members joined in interviews to find internal engineers or assisted on technical assessments; our engineers were also helpful in onboarding her new developers and teaching them the tech stack.

Meanwhile, our team’s Project Manager also oversaw OfficeTogether’s new hires to bridge the gap between both teams and make sure collaboration was smooth. The PM also coordinated OfficeTogether’s quality assurance team, helping them set up and manage QA processes.

All in all, we agree with Amy when she says our collaboration was, and still is, “a great success.” Our 4 weeks with the OfficeTogether demo and the 7 months (and counting) of work that followed epitomizes what Amplified strives to do with every project: deliver an incredible product, help a startup seize an opportunity in the market by bringing their product to life, and become a helpful, reliable, and trustworthy partner of the highest calibre.