Bike4Mind Proccesses
Our leadership has founded and sold multiple game companies, including an exit to Zynga as a GM and held leadership on Mafia Wars and FarmVille. This experience of building and running games at the largest of scales imbues our culture to be:
- Intensely data-driven
- Zealous about taking in customer feedback
- Focused on shipping as fast as practical on modern CI/CD systems
We do not endorse heavily jargon-loaded business software development methodologies, and while we have a game development culture, please understand that the $300B game industry is one of the most brutally competitive industries in the world and gamers are notoriously demanding - even when they are playing a free to play game!
Client Engagement
We do all of the usual and expected onboarding calls to understand your needs. We have met onsite with all of our current enterprise clients and often become embedded co-development teams.
Depending on the scope of the project we allocate from 1 to 10 resources that span full-stack software development, QA, project and product management.
Each project has a Bike4Mind client success manager. We set up dedicated slack channels for nearly 24x7 communications as we have centers of excellence in Austin, Cebu and Kyiv.
Clean Priorities
We think long term, while delivering features, polish, and issue resolutions every day. We use just four priorities:
- P0 - On fire - fix it now
- P1 - This is our priority, build and ship to prod as soon as possible
- P2 - Desired, should happen in the next 10-60 days, but is timing flexible
- P3 - Not going to do it, but also want to hold onto the idea in the backlog
We can adapt to customer's internal processes and artifacts, JIRA, Confluence, Monday, etc. Internally we use github issues and the github project kanban board.
Our generalized stack-rank:
Bugs > Performance > UX Polish > Features
All reported bugs are triaged same-day and generally are turned around < 24 hours, some bugs that are not considered impactful are ranked as a P2 and are funded on a more leisurely pace. B4M comes with several modes of feedback capture, and via admin settings email addresses and slack channels may subscribe to user bug reports.
Business Approach
With each of our clients we pride ourselves on conducting fairly bold interviews to deeply understand their business needs and will drive until we identify the KPIs that measure the impact of our work applied to their business.
Our methodology and culture is highly effective being born out of the crucible of game development, we are often elevated to true internal team status and advise on technology deployment at large with multiple of our customers.
Communication
Internally we leverage slack and demand that everyone at Bike4Mind is excellent at written communication and provides detailed asynchronous status on their tasks and projects. We use Loom extensively to record over written artifacts, diagrams, software, defects as humans we get so much information from body language and tone.
Structure
We have a very flat organization of 25 total human resources, we are assembled internally into teams of 3-6 with a few dedicated shared resources: UX design, QA, mgmt.
On Testing
We use unit testing extensively, excellent CI/CD through SEED wrapping AWS microservices and have the ability to rollback on a tap of a button. We are ramping up our automated testing and are heavy on our manual testing. All of our developers have local environments with corresponding access to the full complement of services including databases, S3 buckets and we enjoy fully equipped preview builds and testing.
Play Books
We do have pre-mortems and post-mortems but are sized to the issue. We do not worship the gods of process, rather process supports us.
Analytics
Each Bike4Mind installation is "batteries included". Analytics counters are attached to all significant events, and all the usual web browser metrics are recorded. Dashboards internal to B4M give user insights like browser, OS, screen resolution, login stats and then all of the internal usage stats. No need to wire up to yet another BI tool or analytics package to get telemetry on B4M. Every day a 24-HR and 7-day review of 40 points of telemetry is sent to email and slack and includes an genAI TL;DR summary of insights and action items for the humans to follow-up on.