Functional MVP on a Deadline

Goal #

Quickly build a functional minimum-viable product version of a software phone application to connect employees' phones to an internal call center, and allow us to stop paying for extremely expensive software for just a few employees.

My Role #

I was the lead front-end developer on the project, focused on the "front of the front-end". There was a backend developer who handled all of the websocket events & core functionality, and a "back of the front-end" dev who handled a lot of the authentication, websocket connection, and other application logic. We also had a project manager who, particularly in the beginning, did not have a lot of time to dedicate to the project, and a designer who was picking up

Process #

Results #

We had a functional version of the application up and running slightly over deadline and were able to successfully roll out the application over a few weeks, and after a month or two of verification, end the expensive contract this was replacing. Ultimately the biggest blocker was environment setup. The goal was to have the environment working as part of our very first milestone, but the devops team had a ton of higher-priority work to balance and there are a number of technical complexities they were trying to wrangle for the first time, so there's not much that could have been done about that. We made the most of software like Loom and good communication to work around it.