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Startups

Wise insights

How to define what goes into an MVP and where to draw that line of features that everyone would love but that would, still, go later? This is a very common question by entrepreneurs who start considering [MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/mvp-development/). Including multiple *killer features* in the minimum viable product, startup founders trap in MVP overengineering, spend too much time and resources on implementation, and as a result, fail in the core tasks behind the MVP step. 

What to include in the MVP is a dilemma we talk about in this post. Based on our experience launching and scaling tech startups, we’ll give you some hints on how you can avoid the never-ending must-haves list of features and focus on what’s truly important when you build an MVP. 

## Why is scoping essential in the MVP development process?

The basic idea of MVP product development is to create a product version with the most essential feature set as quickly as possible to get feedback from potential customers and expand the product based on it. This statement hides the reasons why scoping is an important step of the MVP development process.

With the help of MVP you can evaluate the hypotheses you have on the problem that your product solves or innovative approach to a common issue it offers, or check if client persona was defined properly. An important insight that might help here – you can not test multiple factors at once. Scaling down the amount of things you test during the MVP step adds clarity and helps receive more accurate data. Thus, the functionality you include in an MVP should address the hypotheses you validate with an MVP. No more, no less. 

Secondly, the more functionality you include in the MVP development project, the longer it takes to implement. And the time you spend on developing the product might cost you the overall project success. You need to move fast and bring an initial product version to the audience prior to the competitors.

The development cost is another issue that can not be overlooked. The price for the engineering services will be defined mainly by the scope of work and its complexity, including design complexity, platform number, and required integrations. So trimming down the feature set will not only serve the business goals better but will help you stay within reasonable budgets.

Learn more about MVP development essentials and make sure you’ve developed a [true MVP mindset](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/how-to-develop-a-true-mvp-mindset/) before you start planning this step.

## How to decide what to include in an MVP?

The key idea – scoping MVP development does not start with the list of features. It starts with the question – what problem do we solve and for whom?

From our experience, the main mistake startup businesses fell into is that they misinterpret the purpose of MVP development. It is not about deciding what functionality is the most important, start building a product from it, and iteratively add more functionality to build a robust product. Developing an MVP you aim to bring your customers from point A to point B using minimum features, see if their problem is solved, and get feedback. The next step would be to improve the initial business concept, repivot it to serve the client’s needs better, and modify the product based on the data received after each iteration.

![MVP development process](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/mvp_scope_product_development_69aa6e58cb.svg)

Product value is the next aspect we recommend formulating precisely before making any tech decisions. When dealing with MVP development, you should never underestimate the value your product will have and not focus only on the minimum part. Define the value proposition at that step where you currently are and make sure MVP can bring this value to the first users. The feature set for the MVP development should contain that product hook that will make them move forward, take your product for a spin, and leave feedback on their experience.

## Where to start the evaluation process?

Thus, if you treat MVP as a product version that allows your customer to solve a particular kind of problem, that’s a great start. To proceed, you will need to define a critical user path that will allow your future customers to move from state A to state B with no complications on their way.

For example, if the system requires registration, for the MVP step, you can select one authentication method via Google for the start, rather than provide several options right away. This approach is called Minimum Marketable Flow, and you can learn more about it from our previous post on [tech stack for MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/tech-choices-in-startup-mvp-development/).  

Another approach is to create a prioritization matrix that will help divide the features you’ve had on the MVP development list in terms of the value they bring to the end-users and the computing efforts their implementation requires. Your MVP should contain only the functionality that brings the most value and require the least engineering efforts. As for the features that bring value but a more complex in implementation, you might want to consult with your tech and design teams on how to simplify them for the MVP development step.

![Feature set evaluation in MVP development process](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/mvp_scope_evaluation_e797c18436.svg)

## Can scoping workshop shorten the work on MVP?

Scoping workshop is another great initiative you can either undertake by yourself or with external help. It will help to go through the product concept and idea in detail, create a problem statement, and define the value proposition. After that, it would be easier to work on user journeys and simplify them to the most vital functions that you will then include in the MVP scoping document.

Scoping workshop will be most beneficial if you include your tech team in it. No matter what form this would be – a cross-teams meeting, brainstorming session, or any other format, this workshop is successful if on the outcome you receive:

- Clear roadmap and development directions that include user flows, user cases, and feature set for MVP development. 
- Defined roles and responsibilities for all the team members required for the engineering phase.
- Scope translated into technology. Answers to the questions on the tech stack, required platforms, integrations, and other tech aspects.
- Suggested delivery order, as well as time and cost estimates. 

Make sure you don’t take the scoping step lightly, as MVP simplicity is, in fact, rather complex. It requires a lot of planning, scoping, and prioritizing. From our experience, starting with the scoping workshop helps move along the MVP development step more effectively, for sure.

![Scoping workshop in MVP development process](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/mvp_scope_workshop_38b0902f25.svg)

## How we approach MVP scoping at Wise Engineering?

We always start with the business idea and precisely define the core value behind the product we will provide MVP development services for. This gives out team clarity during all further steps. Sometimes we convert comments into immediate project requirements, in other cases, we initiate the scoping workshop to prioritize the project roadmap.

From our experience, the most effective way is to start communicating directly right away, working with the unique context of a business and all the influencing factors. [Contact us](https://wise-engineering.com/contacts/) to discuss how we can help you get your MVP off the ground, and let's make this new project your next big thing. 





Learn how to include just enough features in your MVP to get the most out of the MVP development process step. Our tech team shares experience on the topic >>

Scoping out the work for the MVP development process

Learn how to include just enough features in your MVP to get the most out of this step. The Wise team shares experience on the topic.

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Company

Corporate values are at the core of Wise Engineering. We sat down with the company’s CEO Max Drogobytskyi to talk about Wise corporate culture and values-driven business. Max has shared what corporate culture means to him, how the company prioritized shared values, explains what values-driven environment is really about, and how values keep company integrated in the long run.

## What makes a values-driven business

**Q. When you started a company what was your idea of a successful business? What was the most important for you at that step?**

M. At that point, the freedom to make decisions myself was what I strove for the most. I didn’t look at other companies and, therefore, never took them as role models. Perhaps, it was my mistake. If I looked, I would, perhaps, make fewer errors and someday would build something similar. Still, I don’t regret anything. I wanted to do everything my way, learned from my mistakes, sometimes I started over. It was a bumpy road, but I am very happy where it got me and Wise Engineering now.

**Q. What does a values-driven company mean to you and at what step did you understand that you need to invest in the culture? **

M. A values-driven company is a company in which when there is a decision to be made, corporate values are taken into account above any other reasons, including rational or financial.

We say that Wise Engineering is a values-driven company because our shared ethics is behind every decision I make as a leader and every action we take as a team. When faced with any difficult choice or any everyday behavior, we are answering the question – does it correlate with our values?

How did Wise become a values-driven company? At what point? I don’t know. It is who we are and how we operated from day one. I was never a manager that made data-driven decisions. My decisions were made based on my subjective beliefs. Yet, we did not always understand what exactly drove us. At some point, we started to question it and, so to say, turn our values into words across the team.

**Q. Can you describe this process a bit further? How was it organized?**

M. It was eight years ago, as far as I recall. At that point we hired the company’s first HR manager, and this was her first major task. We wanted to understand what values we had in common and what aspects made up the company’s value system.

We got three random groups that included almost everyone from the company at that point (everyone who wanted to participate in the initiative). We had several iterations where people working in the groups defined values they shared. At first, they described some eloquent situations, behavior models, attitude, wrote everything down. Then they proceeded with grouping and identifying the values behind these patterns. Then the management team worked on the results each group provided. We assembled a list of values we share on the organizational level and included clarifications for each. 

So we created a document that is now used across teams and all company departments. The greatest part about company values is that you don’t have to invent them. They already exist. All you need is observe what culture you have, make a decision to shape it, and then act upon it. 

![Wise Engineering team](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/values_driven_company_team_fcc26af32a.jpg)

**Q. What were the easiest and hardest parts in building a values-driven business?**

M. Finding the right people is the hardest part. It is much easier to check tech expertise. Several questions and a test task – that’s all you need. With values, the answers are not on the surface. We always include culture fit interviews during the hiring process, still, sometimes you need to let people go after some time working together. Even if it is very important financially to keep this position filled, we never compromise the culture fit aspect. 

Besides, it also might be problematic to differentiate between current core values and aspirational ones. Yet, it is something one needs to learn – see clearly where we are now and where are we heading. And not to mix the two. 

To me, the easiest part is to live by the values you’ve defined. The answers to disputable questions become obvious. You don’t need to create a policy for every situation that might happen in the workspace, and still the whole team has guidelines that they share. Living by values gives you freedom of being who you are, helps build an open culture that is about honesty and integrity.

**Q. Is there any difference between the specifics of building values-driven culture for a product and a service tech company?**

M. Sure. There are not only differences but consequences if the values system is not built. What I mean is that every product company has a very unique mission and set of values based on it. It requires work, but still with people united by this unique mission, even when being spread across continents, they feel more aligned by it.

The mission behind service IT companies is very similar, because so are the goals. Thus, when everyone goes remote in the service company, and there is no culture behind, you no longer talk about the team. In this case, the engineer from an outsourcing company is no different from the one working as a freelancer. Yet, if you work with a service company with embodied culture, you can base your collaboration on shared values. The attitude to work here is different, and so are the results you receive on the outcome. 

That is why, at Wise Engineering, we pay so much attention to us working together more time in our office, why we hold so many corporate events, and always speak of who we are, and why it is important to preserve. 

## People behind Wise Engineering culture

**Q. The company has evolved so much since 2006, what are you proudest of from all these years?**

M. That’s an interesting question. There are many things I’m proud of, but most of all I’d say – people. People behind Wise Engineering I admire the most. And these are both our in-house team and our clients. 

I am very proud that we managed to bring together specialists with deep tech expertise that at the same time are united by the values of growth and ownership. Meantime, our clients become our long-term partners that collaborate with us for years. We cope together with world crises and a variety of challenges. The global projects we are part of are impactful, with unique missions that fully correlate with our worldview.

Being surrounded by these people and contributing to global change-driving businesses makes me really proud today. Especially today. 

![Wise Engineering team](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/values_driven_company_wise_team_c716193276.png)

**Q. How would you describe a person behind the Wise Engineering culture?**

M. Proactive, that’s on top of mind. This person offers and initiates help when that help is needed and gives feedback openly.

This person takes part in company life and takes full responsibility for the things initiated. And this includes multiple non-work related initiatives that we hold at Wise Engineering. We describe this attitude as ownership. To me, this is where the Wise team stands out the most. 

**Q. What ideas hit on you when the war started*?**

**On February 24, 2022, russia started a military invasion of Ukraine. When this interview is published, Ukraine is still fighting for its rights as an independent, sovereign state. *

M. Honestly, there were no new ideas. This war escalation only strengthened the importance of ideas that we had before. This includes our aim of giving our people the ability to work from abroad and gradually moving towards a product company targeting the global audience. This does not mean we wouldn’t take the outsourcing projects, but we plan to transform our expertise in the SaaS products that would address the complex tech challenges. We want to move in this direction. That’s for sure.

Also, like never before, I felt loyalty from both our employees and our clients. Hard times erase all layers and show who are the people around you. I can’t say enough how valuable it is now to feel the integrity of our team and our partners. Wisers did everything to fulfill our obligations to our clients, we continued hard work no matter what, and some teams had even the productivity rise. At the same time, we received immense support from companies and teams we collaborate with as outsourcing tech partners. We are very grateful for this attitude. Today I feel the results of the culture we’ve built for years.

## How to build a values-driven work environment

**Q. What would be your imperative for businesses who try to build a values-driven company?**

M. You can’t create a value system for yourself and your team. You just need to reflect and name what you already have. Faking culture won’t work. Of course, there can be a list of aspirational values that you aim at, but my idea is to start with what drives you currently. 

Explicit values help your company stop operating by rules and policies and start operating by principles. This helps build integrity, open culture, and a strong team that is aligned by shared ethics.  

Don’t be afraid to let your values impact what you do next. You won’t regret it in the long run.










Our CEO, Max Drogobytskyi shares his thoughts on what a values-driven company is, how corporate values are defined, and what impact they make. 

Values-driven company: A Conversation with Wise Engineering CEO

Our CEO, Max Drogobytskyi shares his thoughts on company values and changes that are driven by them. 

Values-driven company: A conversation with Wise Engineering CEO

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From our Tech Talks to group skiing lessons, Wise Engineering company traditions are rich, inspiring, and fun. We are a Ukraine-based company, and it is our corporate culture that helps us today like never before, live through the hard times, stay productive, help those in need, and feel the support from each other. 

Our traditions are aligned with our values of growth, ownership, and our aim to build a work environment of close friendships and caring human relationships. This year our company celebrates the 16th anniversary, and we are proud to say that some traditions are with us from those early days.

We hope our collection will spur some ideas for your workspace and will be happy if you share your company traditions in the comments for the <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6925711789867335680" target="_blank">post on our LinkedIn</a> page.

![Family day at Wise Engineering](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/CW_204544_eba98fbf7c.jpg)

## Growing together

At Wise Engineering, we aspire to high engineering standards and work in the domains that evolve rocket fast. That’s why we never stop learning new technologies and improving our skills. 

### TWIL meetings

The *This-week-I-learned* initiative helps us stay up-to-date with the latest technology news and share knowledge across teams. The slot for this meeting is booked in advance every Friday afternoon for all Wise Engineering teams. If you have an interesting topic to share, you announce it in the Slack channel and get about 15 minutes for a short presentation. Sometimes there are more than one speaker. All depends on the week load.

The topics are not necessarily technical (though they usually are). Sometimes we speak of Mars exploration, plane engines, and handy devices our engineers built.

### Book clubs

Several book clubs are operating at Wise Engineering all year round. You can join a technical book club or the one where we read books on innovations, soft skills development, and business growth. The book club owner selects a book and gathers a group of people who would read it together. Once a week, group comes together to discuss the chapters planned for reading and share insights and their experiences. We read in English, of course.

Among the latest books that impressed us the most were *Turn the Ship Around!* by L. David Marquet and *The Culture Code* by Daniel Coyle. From the first we’ve learned from the former Navy captain David Marquet’s true story on how to grow ownership attitude within a team. Reading the second, we had active discussions on how the corporate culture is built and what makes different teams succeed. It seems like at Wise, we like books that are based on real life stories one can then further explore.

### Tech Talks

Wisers like to share their knowledge. We do it all the time: when meeting in the office kitchen for coffee or holding internal knowledge-sharing events. We also love to spread our expertise outside the company. 

Before the pandemics, Wise Tech Talks was one of the coolest tech events in our city and always gathered a lot of professionals. Last year we experimented with the online format, and that was a great experience as well. So in future, we plan a mix of both online and offline events.

![Wise Tech Talks](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/00184_3f68691e0f.jpg)

## Raising ownership

Ownership is one of the Wise Engineering core values and it is encoded in a Wiser DNA. We own what we do, no matter if this is a work project or a charity initiative. We initiate changes and manage their realization. Our ideas at the company have all the chances to turn into startup businesses. 

### Thank you cards

Ownership always requires effort, and at our company we understand and value the impact that was made. We have a firm tradition to thank people in person as well as post thank you cards on a special board. This helps us emphasize the importance of the help received or the initiative that was successfully realized.

Very often we share thank you cards for the people who initiated some charity events, arranged exciting trips, or workshops. Each of such events results in numerous personal thank you cards to the owner. 

### Anniversary certificates 

70% of Wise Engineering tech teams work together for more than five years. The first Wise employee recently celebrated his 16th anniversary.

Work anniversaries are important and pleasant small celebrations at our company. Personal anniversary certificate is one of the tradition related to it. A certificate is a fun document that indicates the top work and personal achievements of a person celebrating the anniversary. 

The process of the certification creation is interesting as well. The current team and people closest to the person join a Slack channel where they share all the things they are thankful for to this person, major achievements, and some funny stories. The best of them are included in the final certificate version that is printed and presented in solemn atmosphere.

![Wise anniversary certificate](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Ihor_anniversarry_ab15522f5d.png)

In the peaceful times, the certificate was accompanied with a present which since the military invasion we now transformed into the donations to the selected charity funds on behalf of the person celebrating.

### Suit up day

Long ago, at Wise Engineering, we once had an employee with an exquisite love for suits. It is not a usual outfit engineers select for daily work but Oleh, the manager, looked very elegant every day. So once, to surprise him for his birthday, everyone in the office wore their best suits and dresses. Since that time, we have been committed to suit up on Oleh’s birthday every year. Many married Wise guys joke that this is a great opportunity to wear their wedding suits.

The tradition was not broken even during the pandemic times. Photos in official clothes were taken and shared online. This year, we invited Oleh to our new office and presented him with a bow-tie. He was moved. Every person matters at Wise Engineering, everyone can start a tradition, or we can start one for you.  

![Wise suit up day](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/IMG_2034_ec80c70a15.jpg)

## Great times together

It is worth mentioning that while our country is at war all the celebrations are postponed till the Victory day. Still, to cope with the current stress, it helps to have all these dear memories of marvelous time we’ve spent together. They empower our hope that very soon we’ll be able to plan another great event for the Wise team.

### Family day

When days are getting warmer we organize a celebration where Wisers can invite their families to join the celebration. Pets are also welcomed.

To tell the truth, this is the favorite holiday of all the small Wise-kids as we always plan a lot of fun activities for them. They visit parents in the office every now and then, but it is much more fun to play outdoors and with other small *partners-in-crime*. Our best company photo shoots come from the Family Day celebration, as the atmosphere there is truly unique.

![Family Day at Wise Engineering](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/CW_204920_1_ee0c84dea5.jpg)

### Wise-parties

Besides Family Day, Wise Engineering holds three events yearly – Programmers Day, New Year Party, and Wise Day (an official company’s birthday). For Programmers Day and New Year celebrations we always opt for some holiday theme that everyone prepares for very thoroughly. The previous year, for example, for the Programmers Day we selected the Oktoberfest theme, and many Wisers ordered national outfits directly from Austria and Germany to look as authentic as possible. There is always a competition for the best costume, and it is always a battle hard to win. 

For the Wise Day, the team goes to the Ukrainian Carpathian mountains and spends weekends there breathing the mountain air, celebrating achievements of the year and brainstorming ideas for the future. Another tradition associated with corporate parties is that, when you visit one, you get a badge with a unique engraving for each celebration.

![Programmers Day at Wise](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/1031_4464f56065.jpg)

### Corporate sports

Running semi-marathons is one of many Wise sport passions. We have a team of runners who train together and take part in the competitions. The Wise team admires their incredible achievements after each race.

Skiing is considered a corporate sport. Expect to get *Do-you-ski?* question during the initial interview. If not, you will eventually. The best practice is received during the Wise Day, where you receive 2 or 3 days to practice. Wisers enjoy skiing and snowboarding. Wise-kids learn to ski starting from the age of four, and group lessons are arranged for the company newcomers. 

This year we prepared for the Wise Day in advance and were about to set for the trip on February 25th. Instead, we donated the money planned for the celebration to the Ukrainian military and focused on the volunteering tasks and our main obligations to Wise clients.

![Wise corporate sport](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Foto_2022_02_02_04_38_13_pp_8bfb462109.jpg)

## New traditions will start soon

We have a firm belief that after our country’s victory, we'll have some more wonderful Wise-traditions. To start with, Victory Day will be the most cherished holiday for all of us. We’ve already spoken of visiting the regions of Southern and Eastern Ukraine, which currently suffer from the military invasion the most. We’ll definitely dive more deeply into the country’s history and learn more about its beautiful traditions. 

Today, we do not write thank you cards to each other. All the thankful words are addressed to the Ukrainian military who are fighting bravely for all the traditions we have on national, corporate, and family levels. 


Learn about Wise Engineering company traditions to know us better and get some ideas for your workspace.

Corporate traditions WE cherish today more than ever

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The mobile app market is highly diverse. Yet, if looked closely, apart from the fact that mobile applications offer unique features not available via other channels, usually the most successful ones often specialize in one or a few unique purposes. In other words, they have a unique product value behind them. 

MVP for mobile apps helps validate the startup's main idea or product value proposition and create an app that would be useful, widely used, and, hence, well-monetized. The specifics of the mobile app MVP creation hide in the fact that in the case of mobile apps, [MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/mvp-development/) is more about analysis, planning, and strategy rather than complicated engineering. Let’s explore this insight more precisely so that when you decide to start developing your business idea, you will be well prepared.

## Guess less and get data instead

What is a mobile app MVP? A Minimum Viable Product is a workable app model that can execute its core functionality. MVP technique is rather useful if done with critical thinking and accurate planning. Besides, an app MVP should be built in a timely manner and contain just enough features to satisfy potential customers and collect their feedback to plan the next product versions. 

MVP allows businesses to collect data on the target market, validate hypotheses before investing many resources into it, and plan further steps based on the information they receive.

![benefits for mobile app MVP](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/mobile_app_MVP_benefits_782546c9ea.svg)

We recommend tech businesses to start with an MVP development in the cases when:

- A new mobile app demands a different behavior from customers in a given context.
- You need to validate if the solution you are offering to a particular problem is acceptable.
- The product value is not that innovative but the UI for the app differs from similar solutions on the market.
- You want to develop a product iteratively and create a lean startup business model.

To sum up, regardless of the goal you want to achieve with this step, as long as you have the [right MVP mindset](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/how-to-develop-a-true-mvp-mindset/) for you and your team and understand why an MVP is built in the first place, you will be able to take the most value from it for your business.

## Before making any tech choices
In the case of MVP for mobile apps, the more carefully you approach the initial phases of MVP development, the faster your tech team will be able to implement your ideas and the more relevant data you will receive. Here are the most impactful decisions to make before starting any tech consultations.

### Define app value for end-users
How your new mobile app delivers value to your target audience is the key idea to keep in mind when starting any activities. This is a foundation for all further activities related. If you have the product value well defined first, you will clearly understand what hypotheses you need to validate and, most importantly, what functionality you need for it.

- Make a list of the core assumptions about the new application, the problems it addresses, and how it solves them.
- Analyze your competitors for more insights and formulate a more competitive edge over the existing solutions. 
- Define what is already viable on the market and formulate a unique value proposition that will help your app stand out. 

### Decide on app monetization
You might not include monetization implementation during the MVP development step, yet, it would be good to know for the tech team where you are heading and plan the app architecture accordingly. It is much easier to consider the chosen monetization approach at the initial stages than to integrate it out of the blue when the app logic is already implemented.

The most common monetization models include:

- **Free and paid app versions**. Usually, the free version has somewhat limited functionality or some data storage limits, if compared to the paid version.
- **Free app with in-app purchases**. The main app features are free, but some premium or extra features require payment.
- **Free app with subscription plans**. The app is free to download with some limited access and via the purchasing of subscriptions, the functionality can be extended.
- **Paid app**. The only paid variant is available for apps, a common model for productivity apps, for example.

Of course, the chosen approach can be changed after the MVP is launched and you receive feedback, yet this applies to every part of the app, and you and your team should be ready for this. 

### Outline basic marketing strategy

Thinking that great apps sell themselves is misleading. No matter how unique the value your app provides, there are always many other products fighting for the same users’ attention. Before starting to discuss the MVP implementation it would be helpful to have a roadmap for marketing activities as well. 

As a marketing strategy is based on specific objectives, goals, and deadlines, the tech team and project managers will be able to understand all the marketing context for the project and act accordingly. For example, make sure the application is prepared for the potential increase of users when big marketing campaigns start. 

At this step, you might also want to plan the tasks for your marketing team. The usual pre-launch marketing can include:

- Creating a landing page focusing on the app offer and aiming to capture users’ attention. 
- Preparing a press kit for your app (short review guide, screenshots, and video presentation)
- Materials to prepare for app release on App Store and Google Play (app description, screenshots, onboarding guides).

### Define success metrics for mobile app MVP

Defining how you will measure the success of your MVP project will help both your management and your tech teams make informed decisions on future steps. From our experience, teams that have shared the unique KPIs in the earliest stages more clearly understand the goals behind the MVP phase and collaborate more effectively.

Here are some important metrics to watch closely during the development of MVP for the mobile app:

- **Conversions** (for example, from a landing page visit to the app download, from installing to active using)
- **Customer acquisition** over a period of time
- **Active users** (number of people actively using the application)
- **Churn rate** (the percentage of users who uninstalled the application during a given period of time)
- **App performance metrics** (average load speed, crash reports, and more)

## Main steps in mobile app MVP development

Depending on the app idea, market specifics, business context, required functionality, and other essential parameters, the flow can be somewhat customized for each specific case. Some apps are more simple and require less planning, others demand complex analysis, both business and technical. Hence, some of the phases can be extended or shortened respectively.

On the high level, here’s how we approach the MVP development for a mobile app at Wise Engineering.
![mobile app MVP roadmap](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/mobile_app_MVP_roadmap_6af86d0a37.svg)

### Product discovery

In the case of mobile app MVP development, the better the planning is done, the faster the tech team will cope with the implementation, and the more valuable data the MVP step will produce. That is why we always pay attention to this step and suggest you do the same. 

Essential questions that require answers during product discovery:

- Who is your target customer?
- What problem does your app address?
- Who are your competitors and what is their value proposition?
- How do you plan to monetize it?
- What distribution channels will be there?
- What are the deadlines (time-to-market planned)?

At this step, we start to map out what the app should do and how it should function. Raw wireframing will help to understand the entire user journey and uncover possible complexities that will be taken into account during the tech consulting step.

### UX & Design

One of the main tasks at this step is to assemble correctly the minimum marketable user flow for your future application. The **minimum marketable user flow** contains just enough features that allow users to take the app for a spin but do not include any extra functionality. We’ll talk about how to assemble the feature set for an MVP further. 

At this stage it is important to pay attention to the intuitive UI as with mobile applications, users are not used to reading any documentation and guides. Simple onboarding is all you can expect from them, yet people still tend to skip it very often. Thus, only an intuitive UI will ensure they proceed further after the installation. 

Mobile app design is another aspect. You might not want to invest a lot of resources in developing brand visual identity at this step, which is common practice with MVPs. Some basic brand identity like a simple logo, color scheme, and unified fonts would be more than enough. Consistency is the main rule here. After the MVP phase is over you’d be able to work on product design more attentively.  Here’s how our team helped to improve the brand look for a [podcast recommendations platform](https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/podnods/) after the MVP launch.  

We also advise design teams to create clickable app prototypes, in <a href="https://www.figma.com/prototyping/" target="_blank">*Figma*</a> or <a href="https://www.invisionapp.com/cloud/prototype" target="_blank">*InVision*</a>, for example. This helps to spot inconsistencies before the software is already under development.

### Tech consulting 

Once you have the design and prototypes ready, you can start discussing the technology more precisely. Of course, some tech choices can be done somewhat earlier, but the UI/UX components influence those decisions definitively.

This step starts with a document creation containing a list of technical requirements and proceeds with consultations with a variety of specialists. Including system architect, tech lead, project manager, and other engineers whose opinions would benefit the project. The team depends on the project complexity and does not always require a lot of time. 

At this step, it should be decided what approach native mobile app development or cross-platform you will apply. When making a native vs cross-platform approach, we advise considering:

- Application complexity
- Available budget
- Development time
- UI/UX components

After the development approach is selected, the tech stack composition becomes rather obvious. Swift for iOS app development, Kotlin for Android app development, if you go the native way, and React Native or Flutter if cross-platform development is planned. Plus, the list of necessary integrations and 3-rd party services will be assembled. 

### Back-end development

This step is optional and depends on the functionality selected for the MVP development. Some MVPs with simple feature sets can be launched without back-end development. Yet, for the mobile apps that process user data, store them, and need to ensure their security it is inevitable. The back-end of a mobile application functions as a server for users to sort the information they add to the app.

The basic feature of the mobile application back-end include:
- Authentication
- Database
- Scripting
- Architecture
- Automatic synchronization
- Push and email notifications
- API console
- Analytics
- User management

### Mobile development

At this step, the mobile development team starts design implementation based on the API and back-end configurations. Our mobile development team says this is the easiest part of the entire mobile app MVP development process if all the previous steps are done efficiently.

To cope with the step successfully, the tech team needs to understand how to develop high-performance and reusable UI components that are in line with the App Human interface and Material guidelines. The 3rd-party integrations are also being built and configured at this step.

### QA & release

An accurate testing process ensures the delivered functionality meets the high standards of mobile app development. At Wise Engineering, for example, we pay thorough attention to creating testable, maintainable code that allows us to easily incorporate new functionality and set up rigorous testing processes.

We also assist our clients and handle the entire approval process for both App Store and Play Market applying best practices we’ve learned developing mobile applications for our customers for 8 years.

Note, that after the official release of the mobile application, the iteration process starts over. After the feedback is collected and analyzed, your MVP development team will start working on the improvements.

## Common mistakes to avoid

While the roadmap for each specific case of mobile app MVP development differs, the traps startups get into are rather common. Let’s look more closely at the aspects businesses tend to underestimate at the MVP development step.

### Lack of focus

Features overload is the key reason MVP fails. And what exactly is meant by an MVP failure? Few people bought a subscription, the project was not profitable, and there were few conversions? Are these goals even applicable to an MVP development phase? Not quite.

Idea validation with minimum resources spent and at the shortest time possible is the main goal behind any MVP. Thus, it requires focusing on the app's core functionality that helps users to test the application and define if it helps to solve their problems and leave feedback on how the product can be further improved.
 
To make the decision on what to include in the MVP version, we advise creating a prioritization matrix that helps to filter out all the functionality you have in the lists in terms of the value they bring and the technical effort they require. Thus, features that bring the most value and are not that complicated to implement are the first to include in the MVP feature list. The functionality that brings value and is somewhat more technically complicated should be discussed. Do you have the time and resources for its implementation? The features on the lower part of the matrix can be postponed and planned for implementation for the next app version.

![feature set for mobile app MVP](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/mobile_app_MVP_feature_set_f68c9ac90b.svg)

### Not thinking long-term 
When planning an MVP with our clients we include a number of questions that help us understand how stakeholders see further product development on a high level. This helps us make tech decisions that would benefit the project in the future. 

For example, understanding the possible planned next steps after the MVP launch helps to make decisions in favor of native or cross-platform mobile app development. If long-term perspective is not taken into consideration, there can be mistakes in tech choices, and changing either a tech stack or app engineering logic always takes time and resources to fix.

Clearly, there will be pivots after the MVP launch, but they are more connected to adapting the functionality to serve the users better, introducing new features, and customizing the existing ones. These changes can be implemented fast if your tech team thinks a bit in advance within your business context. Check out how we approach [tech stack architecture for MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/tech-choices-in-startup-mvp-development/) at Wise Engineering. 

### Forgetting the analytics

In the previous blocks, we’ve discussed the main goal for creating an MVP – validating a business idea within limited timeframes and resources. Thus, to make the most of the minimum viable product, gathering the analytic data is vital.

With each of our clients, we always discuss if the data they receive from, for example, Apple and Google markets’ analytics is efficient or whether we need to configure other services that would help understand how users interact with the application better. For example, this may include app heatmaps and behavior funnels to monitor in-app behavior.

Along with qualitative data, it is important to collect qualitative information. For this, make sure the MVP app version includes in-app feedback widgets, subtle click-to-choose options integrated into the app interface. They help users share valuable feedback after they, for example, completed a series of actions.

### Inefficient stakeholders’ involvement 

If one believes that they can give their tech team a task and come back in two months checking the results, they are mistaken. From our experience, the more involved the CEO or founders are in the development process, the faster the product in the desired state is brought to the market.

We do not say you need to be there to clarify every slightest nuance. Of course, all the routine tasks would be taken care of by the project manager, but every now and then engineers should be able to discuss significant aspects, suggest optimizations, and clarify requirements. This can be done during weekly demos, for example. 

At our company, we are very proud of the collaborative approach we’ve developed with our clients. Setting up an effective communication loop between all the counterparts is critical for us. Read more about how we adapted the [new communication model in software development outsourcing](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/new-communication-model-in-software-development-outsourcing/). 

## Development team for mobile app MVP 

Your dedicated team for the project might consist of a variety of specialists, all depending on what mobile application you are about to create. Typically the team includes:

- Project manager to plan and coordinate the team's work.
- Designer to create app prototypes and develop a brand visual identity. 
- If you opt for a native development approach: web engineer for API and back-end development (if it is required for the selected feature set) and iOS and Android developers.
- If you select creating cross-platform, the work on one application will be shared between the front-end and back-end engineers.
- Depending on the application, the DevOps engineer to set up the engineering environment for continuous integration and delivery.
- QA engineer for mobile application testing.

Yet, this does not mean that you should hire a team of fifteen people to launch an MVP. In most of the cases at Wise Engineering, teams of 3 to 4 manage to deliver great results for our clients. For example, here’s how in a small team we created a [cross-platform mobile app for contractors](https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/blue-collar-lists/) in the USA.

To calculate the mobile app development cost, multiple project aspects are taken into account. The chosen development approach (native or cross-platform), feature set complexity and design components are the key factors that influence the price. Thus, a simple app that serves one key function will cost less and, if planned correctly, will drive value with a rather small investment. More complex development, clearly, will require more resources. During the product discovery phase, we help our clients define functionality and approaches that would bring the most value and omit those engineering efforts that drive less tangible benefit.

Our team is open to new projects in the native mobile development or cross-platform development domains and would gladly provide you with tech and business consultations.
[Contact us](https://wise-engineering.com/contacts/) to book a call with our business development team and start moving towards your goals with an experienced tech partner.



Learn specifics of MVP development for a mobile app. Stay prepared for the hidden challenges before making any tech choices and after development starts.

From idea to MVP for mobile app | Wise Engineering Blog

Learn specifics of mobile app MVP. Be prepared for the challenges before making tech choices and after development starts.

From idea to MVP for mobile app

marketplace_MVP_preview.svg

E-commerce

Over the past 15 years, our company has been collaborating with startups across the globe on launching and scaling their marketplace businesses. Working across industries, we now clearly see how the concept of a marketplace startup has evolved recently. A marketplace platform is no longer a place for selling physical goods exclusively. Custom marketplace-like businesses are now aiming at solving complex problems, allowing vendors to bring their creativity, digital products, and a variety of services to broader audiences.  

This blog is a summary of our thoughts regarding the [MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/mvp-development/) of the marketplace app. From our experience, the MVP step helps to quickly validate the ideas and make necessary product pivots before the actual product development starts. Here’s how you can organize this step for your project more effectively.

## No one needs another marketplace

However sad it sounds, with the shift towards branded marketplaces, only companies with the mission and specific problems they are addressing can count for users’ attention and favor. 

How does this relate to the MVP development phase? The answer is simple. If you’re launching a regular marketplace the same as myriads others out there, what’s the point of developing its MVP? What is there to validate with a minimum viable product? You can select one of the ready-made E-commerce solutions and start a business.

But if you have a specific idea in mind of how you can connect different people and solve challenges they are facing, you need to see if this idea receives traction. For this, analytics data and client feedback would be valuable and help you understand how you should change the initial concept to make it more useful and, hence, profitable. 

The success of marketplace business in the post-covid reality requires more than an easy-to-access shopping destination. A successful marketplace today is no longer a place having *everything for everyone* but rather a platform connecting specific vendors, addressing specific problems aimed at specific audiences. Learn more about the [evolution of marketplace app development](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/5-shifts-defining-marketplace-development-in-2022/) from our previous blog post.  

![Marketplace platform development](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_mvp_role_badc092520.svg)

To better define the needs of this specific audience and provide better solutions to the problems they are facing, you need a marketplace MVP. 

Consider launching an MVP if you need to:
- Bring your idea to the market quickly to see if it gets traction
- Learn from the audience feedback and introduce customizations
- Build a product within the fixed budget and timeframes
- Showcase platform concept to stakeholders

Check out our recent post on [MVP mindset](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/how-to-develop-a-true-mvp-mindset/) to be more prepared for the planning step.

## Feature set for the marketplace MVP

A minimum viable product, or in the case of marketplace development, a minimum viable platform is a custom solution that solves the core problem of the target audience and meets the key expectations of all the sides of the marketplace – vendors, customers, and business owners. 

The success of any product, and marketplace platform is no exception, is the unique value proposition it offers. With the marketplace model, this value proposition should be formulated for both sellers and buyers. And only after the value proposition is defined the core features set for an MVP can be assembled. For each business, the value propositions, and thus, the unique features set for an MVP will differ, but if to look at this aspect from a very high-level perspective, there are some common patterns.
- **Value propositions for vendors** should contain the ability to market the products or services they produce. Each vendor needs the ability to customize their profile to bring their unique proposal to the platform’s visitors.
- **Value proposition for customers** should include an efficient search experience on the platform that delivers specific product or service variants for a peculiar user. Ability to compare vendors, select the best matching variant and make a purchase quickly. 

As** for business owners (or administrators)**, the key functions will include the moderation of all the counterparts, as well as efficient analytics on how both vendors and customers interact with the platform, at what steps of the UX there are problems, and what workflows work best. 

To sum up, the feature set for the marketplace MVP should allow all the counterparts to fulfill their ultimate goals on the marketplace platform, and depending on the product type, industry, or any other specifics these features will vary. The important thing to understand is that the better you formulate your value proposition for the specific audience, the easier you define the workflows you want to test and definite the features to implement during the MVP development step.

![Feature set for marketplace MVP](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_mvp_feature_set_bc41872e75.svg)

## Functionality requiring special engineering expertise

Depending on the main idea behind a custom marketplace, the functionality that would require the most engineering efforts will vary. From our experience, the aspects listed further can become one of them.

### Online payments

Along with the defined problem your business addresses and value proposition for the target audience, at the MVP development for startups it is vital to decide on the business monetization strategy that can be realized via:

- Commission fee
- Subscription plans
- Paid listing
- Advertisement

Besides, to enable purchasing on the marketplace, the platform should be connected to at least one payment gateway. Taxing & invoicing, split and recurring payments, payouts, inventory management, online payment security, and compliance are other aspects to consider in advance and require expertise from the tech team in charge of the MVP development.

### On-site search
E-commerce search is important when your business relates to the user-generated content, digital products, service line, or product catalog that is hard to categorize.

This functionality is beneficial for both end customers and vendors. For the first, the more relevant the search results delivered, the better user experience is provided. <a href="https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/14953/what-do-76-of-consumers-want-from-your-website-new-data.aspx" target="_blank">76% of website visitors</a> think that the key UX factor on a website is how easily they can find the necessary information. For vendors, the relevant work of the on-site search engine ensures fair competition on the marketplace platform. 

Of course, all the advanced search customizations of the internal search are out of the question at the MVP development step, but some features require minimum engineering efforts but greatly enhance the customer experience even at the initial steps. They include:

- Autocomplete for the search queries. 
- Sound-like and synonym search. 
- Fuzzy search (ignoring typos, plural and case forms, and more).
- Faceted search and filters. 

Learn how the [E-commerce search](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/e-commerce-search-budgeting--where-to-invest-first-/) can be developed across development iterations.

### Product-specific requirements
A lot of functionality that is developed at the MVP steps depends on the unique business idea. The more complex the products presented on the platform, the better you need to plan the platform's architecture for further scaling.

If you are creating a marketplace for some digital content, videos or podcasts, for example, separate attention should be paid to creating a video upload and playback library and the platform’s infrastructure. If you know that there are some marketing campaigns planned, your tech team should prepare the system for the expected number of visitors and higher system load. With any other business context or requirements list, the tech aspects that would require more attention will vary. 

Learn more about how to approach [tech stack planning for the MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/tech-choices-in-startup-mvp-development/) step.

## Roadmap for marketplace platform MVP development

To bring the expected results, the MVP development step should be thoroughly planned. This phase should contain only the development of functionality that allows users to test the platform from start to the desired state but not with multiple options on their way. This approach is called Minimum marketable user flow and, from our experience, helps to avoid over-engineering and speeds up the launch significantly.

The infographic below summarizes how the marketplace MVP step is usually organized when our team is involved in the engineering process.

![Roadmap for marketplace MVP](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_mvp_workflow_24293304f9.svg)

## Marketplace businesses we helped to launch
Here are some inspiring startups that are based on the multi-vendor marketplace concept – bringing creators closer to their specific audiences. Our team is very proud to be part of their success stories as the mission behind each of them is impactful and inspiring.

### Online auction and events marketplace

One of our clients decided to challenge the regular entertainment opportunities like visiting a concert or sports event and decided to launch a marketplace of exclusive experiences and an online auction. Together with the Wise team, they developed and successfully launched an MVP for a marketplace and now are a fully operational and successful business that managed to survive even the covid pandemic that was devastating for the whole entertainment industry.

Read full [case study on marketplace MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/granted/).

### All-in-one platform for fitness chain

Another Wise client addressed the challenges the covid pandemics brought to the sports and fitness industry. As people were not able to train offline, the platform creators decided to help fitness trainers adopt new approaches to collaboration with their students. 

The platform was designed to allow trainers to monetize their efforts in creating virtual workouts and online personal training programs. With the tech assistance of the Wise team, our client received the MVP of the digital fitness platform in 3 months and launched the platform’s 1.0 version with significant improvements and extensions in another quarter. The collaboration with the fitness trainers as a focus group throughout the development process contributed greatly to the project's success.

Read full [case study on MVP app development](https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/core/).

## What is your idea?
Outsourced marketplace app development services open great opportunities for startuppers today. With a clear vision of what you need to validate at the MVP step and the right tech partner at your side, you can test your idea with reasonable investments and within a strict time frame. 

Contact us to discuss the business context for your marketplace business. We’ll help define the core platform functionality and all the tech aspects to consider at the initial steps, including tech stack assembling, team augmentation, and more. 







This blog is a summary of insights on marketplace MVP development we received launching marketplace businesses for our clients during the last 15 years.

MVP development for a marketplace platform

Consider the specifics of the marketplace business when launching its MVP. Our team shares insights based on our experience. 

MVP_tech_stack.svg


To prepare this article, we consulted two full-stack developers and a DevOps engineer who were all part of the dedicated teams that collaborated on [startup MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/mvp-development/) for several Wise clients. Our aim with this publication was to prepare a handy collection of insights our team received working with real businesses and addressing new challenges in the post-covid environment.

The key idea we would like to communicate is that there is no *best* or *right* technology stack that would suit any tech product type, be it a mobile app, web application, or SaaS product. If you see this type of narrative in the title or introduction of the article, podcast, or video tutorial, you can freely skip it, as they would be misleading. The truth is, the one-fits-all approach is elusive and there is no *right* or *best*. Though **there are criteria to consider, jobs to be done, people to involve in the process, as well as mistakes to avoid along the way**. We’ll focus on these aspects in this blog.

## Before discussing the technology

Prior to starting any considerations related to the technologies you will use, make sure you’ve developed the <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/how-to-develop-a-true-mvp-mindset/" target="_blank">right MVP mindset</a> and have a clear understanding of what you’re about to build and, most importantly, why. 

The key ideas you might want to keep in mind:

- MVP is not a prototype. Users should be able to fully understand the product concept and take it for a proper ride.
- MVP is the best way to test your product with minimum investments. 
- Testing means you need to set up an agile development process when you release new functionality constantly.
- Success metrics for your business should be clearly defined. 
- The big goal behind the MVP can change. The ability to respond flexibly to the findings you receive is your superpower.

Furthermore, let’s define what is meant by tech stack for the startup MVP development. A **technology stack** is a combination of tools your in-house or outsourced engineering team will use to create a web, mobile, or cross-platform application. There are usually the client-side (front-end) and server-side (back-end) parts. Tech stack can consist of a variety of tools, services, frameworks, and programming languages. The mix is unique to each specific project and should be assembled based on the requirements and business context of each product separately. Of course, you can delegate the technology choices to your tech partners, but there is no harm in understanding the basic principles of how this process should be done efficiently.

Here’s how we approach the tech stack architecture for the Wise Engineering clients and our in-house startup products.

## Start with the right questions

What technology is the best to build a web application? This is a type of question we strongly advise you to avoid. To define the unique mix of technologies for MVP app development, your engineering team should have the mockups in front of them, and the discussion should begin with the following questions: 

- What is the core product functionality?
- Who are the users? Where are they located?
- What type of data should be processed? What is their structure?
- Are there marketing campaigns planned? When do we expect user base growth?
- How soon will we need to expand the engineering team?
- What are the time restrictions? Are there due dates set?

All of the aspects above can be broken down into two major categories:

1. **Functional products requirements** (*read: what the product will do*). For example, how users will interact with the system, how the platform will respond, authentication steps, what transactions will occur, and more.
2. **Quality system or non-functional requirements** (*read: how the products will perform*). For example, how fast the system should perform certain activities, what availability is expected, how dependable the system is, what limits systems should handle, and more. 

When it comes to MVP engineering, the non-functional requirements will influence the tech stack choices most of all. Because there are numerous options of how you can realize different features, and, at the same time, when there are high requirements towards security, maintainability, app scalability, and similar, the options range will narrow down significantly.

![Functional products vs quality system requirements](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/requirements_influencing_tech_choices_4b781b7ab6.svg)

## Avoid over-engineering

In <a href="https://innovationfootprints.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/startup-genome-report-extra-on-premature-scaling.pdf" target="_blank">74% of cases</a>, premature scaling leads to startup failure. Let’s define what is meant by *premature scaling* or *over-engineering.*

**MVP over-engineering** happens when a product acquires more features and advanced setups that the business really needs at the MVP development step. This further leads to the situation when a company's revenue from new users acquisition is lower than the cost of maintaining the system itself. The understanding that, before everything, you create an MVP to build a profitable business and a tech stack only gets you there helps not to fall into the premature scaling trap.

When engaged in MVP development services for startups, the key suggestions we give our clients are the following:

- Do not start MVP web development by writing numerous microservices. This increases debugging time and prolongs the overall development time. You can rearrange the system into microservices gradually after the MVP engineering step is over and you proceed with actual product development. 
- When deciding on creating any functionality from scratch applying reasonable buy vs build thinking. Using ready frameworks or services helps decrease product time-to-market and get feedback from the audience faster. Of course, ready-made solutions have lower customization capabilities but do you need that advanced setup to validate the idea and get traction from your MVP? The speed factor wins the competition in most of the cases here.
- For the MVP tech stack, we also recommend selecting up-to-date but proven technologies with extensive engineering communities and an efficient number of developers using them. Of course, using the latest frameworks or programming language is tempting for developers, but this is not the case for your business. You need a stack that consists of proven technologies without any hidden contexts. Plus, once your product scales, hiring more people to the team won’t be an issue.

This, of course, does not mean that the tech stack you select should be simplistic or clunky. Your engineering team should keep the high coding standards and build a system that addresses the business challenges you face and help you achieve your long-term goals.

## Define core functionality and stick to it

There is always a temptation to add one more option or more customization to the existing functionality. Yet, for the MVP development step, this is the point where you start to lose focus. 
To enhance or expand any feature, you need clear and continuous feedback from the audience that they really need it. If the idea to add more functionality belongs to anyone from the team, think twice before adding the task to a backlog.

When the Wise team deals with the MVP development, we focus on building minimum marketable user flow exclusively. **Minimum marketable user flow** is the simplest feature set that reflects the unique selling proposition of the future product. This is a predefined user flow that allows testing the product from start to the desired state, yet lacks multiple options of how this state can be achieved. We usually have the additional flows documented, but our primary focus never shifts.

![Minimum marketable user flow](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/minimum_marketable_user_flow_725aafa6ad.svg)

We described how to generate a <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/how-to-develop-a-true-mvp-mindset/" target="_blank">minimum marketable user flow for an MVP development</a> in one of our earlier blog posts.

## Consult DevOps before writing any code

Developing and deploying an app constantly and at a fast pace is an integral part of the MVP development process. A DevOps engineer enrolled in the team at the initial steps will set the grounds for an efficient Infrastructure as a Code environment and help your engineering team move along the project roadmap smoothly. The base that will be set at this step will help avoid rearranging the overall system once the scaling is required. DevOps engineers help you think long-term and plan the product architecture for further development and minimize the risk your system will be unable to perform later.

The key task for DevOps at this stage is to allow the product and engineering teams to react flexibly towards the feedback they receive launching an MVP. DevOps engineer is responsible for:

- Setting up Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery to allow engineers to deploy changes to the product quickly.
- Building a highly available and fault-tolerant system that will allow you to quickly modify or update the application without downtime.
- Orchestrating the engineering team and ensuring wide-scale collaboration across all people involved in the MVP development.
- Setting up system monitoring and autoscaling to prepare the application for any unexpected system loads.
- Initiating product documentation (we’ll talk about this aspect in more detail further).

Learn how we arranged the product architecture when launching <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/granted/" target="_blank">auctions and events marketplace</a> from the case study.

## Find time for project documentation

Teams dealing with startup launches understand that time-to-market is a vital metric and do everything to reduce it. Still, sparing engineering time by neglecting the aspect of product documentation will negatively impact the development speed soon after new people start joining the team.

A good practice is to start product documentation at the tech stack selection step. You can include the following information:
- What technology did we choose for a specific task?
- Why did we make such a decision?
- What technologies did we consider but didn’t select, and, most importantly, why?  

This information will be useful for every new member of the project and save time on R&D steps if similar issues arise again.

At Wise, we are very attentive to product documentation, yet always define a reasonable time to create it. We also recommend keeping up the fast development pace with the efficient environment for code deployment, focusing on user flow that communicates unique product value and not by keeping all the information in the minds of people currently working on the project.

## Collect data from day one

Analytics is at the core of the overall MVP idea. You build a minimum viable product to test your hypothesis which is impossible without relevant data collection.  

Before starting any steps with MVP planning we always suggest our clients define success factors for their MVP – unique KPIs for their particular business context. These could be both quantitative and qualitative metrics, and it is important to share them with the whole team. From our experience, when everyone involved is aware of the success KPIs and understands the goal behind the MVP step, the team collaborates on the project more effectively.

One of the Wise clients developed an effective approach to MVP creation based on the target audience’s feedback. The team involved the predefined focus group in the evaluation process right from the start. Learn how we developed an <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/core/" target="_blank">MVP for an all-in-one fitness chain platform</a> and learn how the team worked with the focus group’s feedback from the case study. Another our client was using the <a href="https://mixpanel.com/" target="_blank">Mixpanel</a> service very actively to see at what steps we lose a potential client and react iteratively on the UX improvements.

Thus, when you decide what defines your MVP success, collaborate with your tech team to include analytics services in your tech stack.

## Never underestimate communication

Communication might be the least expected aspect in the article about the tech stack for MVP, however, from our 15 years experience of launching MVPs for E-commerce, EdTech, Media & Entertainment, and other industries, effective communication contributes to the overall project success.

By effective communication, we mean both communication inside the engineering team, as well as communication between counterparts involved – founders, stakeholders, and investors. 

Inside the tech team, the decisions on the chosen tech stack should be well communicated and discussed across back-end, front-end, and DevOps parts. And as was stated above, the decisions should be documented. Besides, the people on the client-side should be also well aware of the tech choices. They might not need to be part of the technology evaluation process, but they should receive a summary of what tech stack was chosen and, most importantly, why, and what the alternatives are.

At Wise, we adopted the client-team approach to communication which helps our client reach out to anyone from the dedicated team. This helps to set an effective communication loop at the step of tech stack selection and ensure efficient collaboration when the MVP development iterations start. Read more about the <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/new-communication-model-in-software-development-outsourcing/" target="_blank">new communication model in software development outsourcing</a> we apply to the collaboration with our client.

## Key takeaways

To architecture a tech stack that will benefit you MVP and allow you to make the most from this product development step, we recommend:

- Analyze both functional and quality system requirements.
- Define marketable user flow and plan MVP development roadmap based on it.
- Schedule DevOps consultation before starting the development.
- Consider project documentation as a long-term investment.
- Define MVP success metrics and set up the analytics right from the start.  

At Wise Engineering, we are fluent in different technologies across multiple domains. Check out the tech stacks we usually apply for [MVP development for startups](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/mvp-development/) and contact us to get tech stack consultation and estimates for your project.

What aspects influence tech stack choices in startup MVP development? There is no one-fits-all approach, but there are best practices you can apply >>

Tech choices in startup MVP development

Learn what aspects influence technology choices in MVP development and build a tech stack for your unique MVP idea.

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Search

E-commerce search is an extensive domain, and the computing efforts to on-site search tuning can be rather intensive. But do all the search functions require the same amount of resources to implement? Where should you start when improving the search experience on your website, and what will bring you the most value at different steps? 

At Wise Engineering, we've been working with E-commerce site search implementation and tuning for 15 years, and here's a general roadmap we recommend to our customers. It will help you approach search budgeting more strategically, see where you're now, and where you're going in the long run.

## How to approach search budgeting strategically

As E-commerce companies begin to realize the benefits of improved search experience to their customers, it is now always clear how to start the optimization process and how much resources will be needed for the configuration of each particular feature or selected optimization. 

We’ve divided the whole process of enterprise search tuning into levels depending on the engineering efforts they require. Though we do not provide the exact numbers, you can clearly see what will cost you the most. The higher on the pyramid you go, the more advanced the task is, and the more budget you will need to allocate.

For us, the pyramid also illustrates the logic roadmap of the improved E-commerce search. You can easily start with the first levels, measure the results and move up the pyramid towards the advanced search experience for your E-commerce platform.

This roadmap is applicable to all existing search engine solutions you might currently use – <a href="https://www.elastic.co/" target="_blank">Elastic search</a>, <a href="https://www.algolia.com/" target="_blank">Algolia</a>, <a href="https://solr.apache.org/" target="_blank">Solr</a>, and others. Some features require a few configurations of the search engine and they are on the initial layers of our pyramid. Some search capabilities will be engineered specifically for your business and are located on the top. 

![E-commerce search budgeting](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Investing_steps_for_internal_site_search_799e3253a6.svg)

Let's analyze each of the levels in detail.

## Level 1 – Basic search

The first level usually starts with UX improvements and functionality available out-of-the-box by most search engines and requires a few simple configurations that don’t take much developer’s time. Before starting any significant and time-consuming configurations, try enabling the autocomplete feature, compose separate thesaurus specific to your E-commerce segment, configure a fuzzy search and stopwords filtering. Measure the performance and decide on further investments.

- **UX improvements**. They can, for example, include: creating a visible search box, changing the search box location, highlighting search results, using microcopy for a search bar, showing the number of results, keeping recent user’s queries, and more. 
- **Autocomplete**. Do not consider this a simple feature that reduces typing efforts for customers. Despite the simplicity in the configuration, autocomplete allows your customers to express their search intent aligned with the query understanding of your online store. This helps you increase the search quality with minimum investments.
- **Synonyms**. For every industry you’re selling products or services to, there is a specific synonym range your on-site search should be able to interpret. You can compose a thesaurus specific to your business and add it to the search engine configurations.
- **Fuzzy search**. This configuration helps to ignore typos, plural forms, case forms and minimize the failed search results.
- **Stopwords filtering.** Stopwords are the common words that do not bring any valuable context in most search cases and only expand the search results. At first, the stopwords list can include articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs. Then it can be filled with the words you would define as non-important as you analyze the queries further.

## Level 2 – Search refinement

When the basic search configurations are made, you can proceed with improving how users browse the search results and refine their searches. People hate any extra work, and your customers are no exception. It is always more pleasurable to click on refinement options than browse through multiple paginated search results.

- **Faceted search** helps users refine the search results once they have a listing in response to their query. This could be done based on numerous additional parameters like size, color, brand, price, and more. With facets configured, search results change between the searches depending on the selected parameters.
- **Filters** do not work this flexibly and help only to eliminate the search results based on initial criteria. For example, users can select either browsing shoes for adults or children, but they can not select both and add more parameters to get the search results changed. 
- **Filter suggestion** feature enabled allows users to search directly within a selected category. This also helps searchers avoid information overload and find what they are looking for faster.
- **Sorting** helps to order search records based on specific attributes like price (from lowest to highest or vice versa), popularity, and other parameters.

If it is relevant to your business, at this step you can also configure a **location-based search** and provide results relevant to your customers from different locations.

## Level 3 – Search ranking

We approached the level that would require some more implementation time, and, thus, resources. We included fine-tuning **textual relevance**, **user-based** and **attribute-based ranking** in this step. All of them are related to the search ranking and aim to show at the top those results that address your business goals.

At this point, the search engineering team should closely collaborate with the product or business development teams. The sample questions they would define at this step are the following:

1. What results should be shown at the top?
2. Does merchants' rating influence the relevance?
3. What role does the price play? Do we show the least expensive goods first?
4. What fields are included in the searching process and what should be added or removed?
5. What fields in a product are the most important?
6. How to evaluate the relevance of each product for different customer personas?

Working with your development team at this level, you can set up rules that drive search relevance based on specific parameters.

- **Attribute-based ranking** helps to match shopper queries with not only product names, but also brand names, product types, descriptions, categories, colors, or several of these at the same time.
- **User-based ranking** will take into account demographics, location, user preferences. All the criteria known about the particular user.  
- **Textual relevance** tuning is especially important for the cases when the complexity of catalogs is combined with user-generated product listings. 

## Level 4 – Relevance tuning

Custom ranking surely matters in search optimization and helps address some business objectives, but it is a search relevance model in its broader sense that we want to achieve. 

We recommend starting this step with an **analysis of zero-result queries** that are usually the best source of insights. Why does your system fail to provide what users are searching for in particular cases? At this point, we help our clients compare successful and failed sessions, look more precisely at searches that return zero results, and find commonalities between them. Ideally, we would divide zero-searches into classes and find solutions to turn them into successful ones.

During the previous step, we defined the ranking rules that can be now neglected for some specific use cases. By defining **query-dependent ranking factors**, you can achieve dynamic ranking. For example, you have the rule to show more expensive products on top of the search results, but if a person types the word free in the search bar this rule should be neglected. At this step, with the right tech team, you can fine-tune your search engine to provide the most relevant search results specific to your business use cases.

Furthermore, to make the search system understand which results are relevant for broad or ambiguous queries, you would need to configure **query expansion**. This is a technique when the original user’s query is expanded by adding additional words that help to narrow the query semantics. Query expansion helps determine the searcher’s intent and route users towards a more refined search query.

## Level 5 – Advanced search

We have to admit, this level is the most complex and resource-consuming, yet once you reach it, there are, really, no limits. At this step, you will have the capabilities to rethink how your search performs on the highest level and optimize the enterprise search engine with the most advanced technology and methods. Instead of focusing on the efficient ranking algorithm, you will have the ability to create an efficient query understanding mechanism, an advanced system that will learn along the way and focus on query performance as a key success metric. 

- **Query refinement analysis** helps to look at the process of refining (narrowing down) the initial user searching item and analyze user behavior after the results were provided. This data will help to provide narrowed down paths to results that your users await.
- **Query understanding** is the process of establishing the searcher's intent before providing any results. Your search engine will be able to automatically determine when a search query is broad or ambiguous and expand it to provide relevant results.
- **AI-based search personalization** allows you to serve users personalized search results based on their previous searches, activities, and purchases. The tech team will need to track and collect users' signals, interpret them, and build relevant user profiles. The search results will be modified based on these profiles but the system won't neglect the textual relevance you've built during the previous steps. 

## Configurations running in parallel

As you move along the steps of E-commerce site search optimization, two aspects should be considered no matter where you are in this roadmap. They are internal search monitoring and performance tuning. You can also learn more [E-commerce site search best practices](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/6-e-commerce-site-search-best-practices-for-2022/) from our recent blog post.

### Analytics for internal search

Some queries lead to great performance. Some queries deliver zero results. Without measuring this data, you can not move to optimization at any step. Search analytics provides you with important information on what your customers want, how they describe the products or services they are looking for, and gives you hints on how you can optimize your offers and overall search experience.

For example, you can track:

- Queries users enter
- Most popular results
- Most-bought products after search 
- Most-used filters
- Average position of search result click
- How deep do users go in pagination (do they find good results on the first page?)

Though analytics is a topic that never gets underestimated and is often included in the project scope, setting it up properly is a daunting task for the tech team. Engineers will need to build a data tracking pipeline, normalize queries (taking into account synonyms, typos, word forms), make the analytics privacy compliant, and visualize the results for stakeholders. Analytics also opens a possibility to run A/B tests and evaluate introduced optimizations during and after each level we’ve described above.

### Performance tuning

Because search experience is often the primary path to purchase, making the search for enterprise perform faster even for milliseconds can lead to increased revenue. From day one as you introduced search to your E-commerce store, monitor search for downtimes, speed, and vulnerabilities for the sensitive data you might collect.

When our team deals with on-site performance tuning, we start with tech resources analysis that includes analysis of the computing, memory storage, and network you use to run the search on your platform. After this analysis, we proceed with cluster configuration optimization and index configuration to help the search engine perform faster. All the additional optimizations depend on the business goals set for the internal search.

## Reach us for E-commerce search consulting 

Enterprise search is not something you set and forget. There is always room for investment, and now you have a clear vision of where you might start. You can hire the Wise Engineering team if you're looking for site search experts that can ensure quality, best performance, and scalability for your on-site search.

Learn more about our [Elastic site search expertise](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/elasticsearch-integration/) and contact us to book a consultation to discuss your specific business context.
 

Approach E-commerce search budgeting more strategically. Check out a roadmap for E-commerce site search optimization and get more search conversions. See blog>>

E-commerce search budgeting: Where to invest first?

Check out a roadmap for E-commerce site search optimization and approach search budgeting more strategically.

marketplace_development_main_image.svg

The core strategy of any multi-vendor marketplace is to become an online destination. The E-commerce boom started long before Covid-19 pandemics continues to fuel the competition today. To remain noticeable within their industry segments, companies need to understand what shifts took place recently and quickly adopt changes applicable to their businesses. 

We’ve come up with a list of 5 major approach transformations in marketplace development that should help you shape your E-commerce business strategy for the upcoming year.

## Needs-based vs brand marketplaces

The first and most powerful shift took place in the way customers and marketplace owners see the aim of commerce. Needs-based markets fail to satisfy the present demand. The main principles of convenience, ease, and relevance are no longer about having *everything for everyone in one place*. A positive buyer experience requires more than just a shopping destination. Thus, even mega or niche marketplaces can’t fulfill the consumer’s needs for the buyer (not the product) to be the center of merchants’ attention.

### Brand marketplaces surge

To stand out a marketplace should be more than just a transactional site. And that’s why brand marketplaces are on the rise. Now it’s all about *something for someone anywhere they need it*. And to inject life into commercial operations, marketplaces aim to build strong relationships and gain customer loyalty. That includes **personalization, growing communities, and providing customized service with online shopping**. Thus, the latter turns into a meaningful and united virtual experience. Particular products are targeted to particular customers and create a one-stop-shop.

Another reason for this tendency is that brands try to get rid of the risks of retailers and dealers ruining their brand equity. Thus, any customer at any point has one and only destination for a certain brand. And the popular option is to browse products online, find a physical store location, and *click and collect*, either offline or have it shipped anywhere. Seamlessly integrated buyer experience matters most. 

### What makes a brand marketplace

Brand marketplaces create not just buyer experiences, but membership experiences, and aim to turn into membership economies in the long run. Unbranded search in everything-for-everyone mega marketplaces is replaced with the brand building to provide greater value to the audience. 

To remain relevant in these volatile times, brand marketplaces need to:

- Invest in smart or unexpected collaborations to explore new customer territory and stretch the margins of brand identities. As opposed to outdated brand protectionism.
- Provide overlap between digital and physical brand presence to support multiple touchpoints and hybrid structures.
- Ensure technical maturity across markets to streamline the customer journey.

![Marketplace requirements shift](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_development_brand_marketplace_requirements_3030a09528.svg)

## Enterprise vs small businesses & localization

Another natural alteration relates to geographical location and its influence on commercial success. In the past, it was all about large enterprises merging (read – swallowing) smaller companies to dominate with the same products and services global-wide. In the post-Covid period when local communities get lots of support, localization is a win-win strategy. Especially for cross-border E-commerce.
 
Successful multi-vendor marketplace development in 2022 requires a powerful localized approach. The latter helps international brands gain more revenue in different geographical areas. What matters is speaking to the shoppers in their language in product descriptions and/or customer support. 

### Localization is not equal to text translation
 
The first distinctive localization feature is attention to cultural distinctions and preferences. To engage your local audiences, make the marketplace relevant to them. And it’s not just about translating the pages of websites or apps into other languages. Localization goes far beyond that. It includes offering payment options popular within the region, presenting prices in native currency, and adjusting imagery to the specific cultural, social, or religious features. <a href="https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-cee/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/cross-bording-shopping-strategies/" target="_blank">73% of consumers</a> are still unwilling to trade a localized website for a price 30% lower, as the International Online Shopping Survey shows.
 
Multi-vendor marketplaces can also benefit from local service bundling. Large platforms may offer local services to make them exclusive and preferable in certain areas.

### Large marketplaces empowering local businesses

One more localization approach is to apply the supply chain consolidation local-wise. You can either use only local suppliers and deny international ones or focus on particular domestic regions.

At the same time, large marketplaces have the power to help local businesses either to emerge or evolve. But this doesn’t mean swallowing or blending them. Effective marketplace development in terms of localization means creating bigger ecosystems where small businesses have their part to play. 

Collaborations of companies of different sizes unlock more value for all stakeholders. They boost the local economies via generating additional jobs directly or as side-effects. Large companies also benefit from better matches for different regions. They can get more from the same amount of effort. Yet, to apply this strategy successfully, you should consider the social environment and competition in the local market.

## Single-channel vs omnichannel strategy

The single-channel strategy may still work for companies with limited budgets or scopes. Yet, technology made it possible for consumers to shop across channels with no or little difference in buyer experience. Thus, marketplaces have to do their best to develop their presence in all possible channels. And that incorporates interactions between a brand, a customer, and a retailer.

The prevalence of the omnichannel strategy among multi-vendor marketplaces proves once again that it’s no longer about the product. The focus is shifted to the customers themselves. Brands create a faultless customer experience and leverage the customer data across all channels. 

After all, it’s worth the effort. Businesses with the omnichannel customer engagement strategy retain about <a href="https://cybra.com/10-omnichannel-retail-statistics-you-cant-avoid/" target="_blank">89% of their customers</a> compared to 33% for those with weak omnichannel customer engagement, as the Cybra research proves.

![Comparing single-channel and omnichannel strategies](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_development_single_channel_vs_omnichannel_c7250c2249.svg)

### Omnichannel strategy advantages

The benefits of the omnichannel strategy are rather explicit.

- **Better customer experience.** Consumers interact with the marketplace in preferable ways. Synchronized customer information helps provide a personalized customer experience with little or no chance for incorrect data or shipments.
- **Increase in sales and traffic.** Expanded and more agile sale strategies and value-added content drive revenue.
- **Boosted customer loyalty.** Increased customer satisfaction and high-quality content across all channels help retain customers.
- **Better data collection.** The marketplace gets valuable insights on how to generate content and what offers will work better both online and offline.

### Possible challenges

The benefits of this strategy also might generate some challenges, as they call for a lot of attention to detail and consolidated processes. A seamless shopping experience requires perfect knowledge of your audience to create the right strategies in the right channels. Thus, another issue is the selection of channels that matter to your audience and working on a solid strategy for each of them. 

Yet, the most fundamental factor is the cost and accuracy of the strategy for developing all channels in an integrated and interconnected manner. Consistency requires a lot of resources like time, knowledge, and maintenance. And that results in building teams, skills, content, and tools to manage these processes.

### Why switch from B2C to D2C

To ensure a compatible omnichannel policy, B2C marketplaces can’t afford not to have a powerful D2C strategy. This robust approach allows businesses to prevent their overreliance on brick-and-mortar or third-party retailers. Using D2C channels helped blend offline and online presence in a new *clicks and mortar* business model.

The retail disruption during the pandemic proved that proper D2C strategies also help maintain business continuity and satisfy the evolving demand for uninterrupted *no-middlemen* customer experience. The latter gives direct access to valuable customer feedback that can be used to drive sales. Total control over all aspects of customer experience helps build emotional relations and nurture customer loyalty. 

To build decent customer-facing D2C experiences, marketplaces need to optimize their back-office processes. In such straightforward re-designing of the commerce models, you need to focus on business core competencies. Yet, this challenge can be seen as a benefit for your improving business strategy as a whole. To succeed, learn to concentrate on doing what you're best at and what matters most.  Weigh your options and delegate other aspects that can take too much opportunity cost like [custom E-commerce development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/e-commerce/). 

## Local vs cross-border trade
The immense shift in consumer habits allowed E-commerce to go cross-border with virtually no geographical limitations. This surge doesn’t only apply to certain types of products or services. Consumers make cross-border purchases of everything – from everyday items to luxury. 

And this is not a short-term issue, rather an evolving tendency. Those who converted to online shopping during the pandemic are likely to stay after things go back to normal (well, the new normal). And the predictions are that the bigger part of it will be cross-border.

In a nutshell, despite all the benefits of this marketplace globalization, cross-border E-commerce has no one-size-fits solution. Different marketplaces have multiple options for different markets and regions. Such diversity ensures proper pricing, customer satisfaction, and retention. To stay relevant and profitable, cross-border E-commerce has to tackle several challenges.

### Cross-border banking

Multi-vendor marketplace consumers expect payment options that use local payment networks, their own banks, and new mobile methods. Yet, when a shopper makes a cross-border purchase, the transaction involves not just their bank but the merchant’s bank. It also includes a payment processor, card network, issuing bank, an acquiring bank. Whether the customers select the preferred payment type themselves or follow the merchants’ options, the FX margin may be quite different and, thus, increase the total purchase price. And that’s what your customers need to know in advance.

### Cross-border taxation

Brands selling cross-border need to follow local tax laws, import and export regulations. The outbreak of Covid-19 increased the number of countries that tax foreign exchange payments as well as the tax amount itself.

Failure to understand the nuances in local regulations could result in serious financial penalties and damage to brand reputation. If the consumers bear these additional costs (and they usually do), it’s not the bank, but the merchant who is responsible for all the clarification. Transparency is the only strategy to avoid misunderstanding as to why and what taxes they are charged.

### Price variation across countries

Marketplaces that involve cross-border E-commerce cannot and should not have the same price in different markets and regions. Pricing policy should be elastic locally and internationally. And elasticity is not only about the price but the value as well, both tangible and intangible. 

Price alteration comes in two options.

1. **Cosmetic changes** happen when the merchant only converts the price applying local currency. Earlier, we addressed the importance of localization for gaining trust. Shoppers expect to make a transaction in their local currency (by default or choosing it among other options) regardless of the product’s country of origin. Conversion can still be carried out in different ways. Sometimes it allows the merchant to grasp additional fees and not to let the card issuer benefit from it. 
2. **True price localization** is when the price differs across different markets, countries, and regions. In this case, price (and availability) for goods or services may vary globally or even across one country either due to governmental policies, currency exchange rates, taxes, tariffs, and insurance factors or market individuality like consumption composition, facilities, providers, competitors, brand preferences and local market needs.

In any case, the three major points are: to be transparent with the buyers, to stay within the internal pricing corridor for price differentiation, and to handle the price localization yourself.
 
Thus, to make the price relevant to actual market value, it is possible to use automated monitoring tools. They help keep track of products in different distribution channels, resellers and competitors, inside different countries and markets. Automated monitoring tools save the merchants time and money. And the data you receive prompts how to improve your branding strategy.

### Security issues

Multi-vendor marketplace development also requires reliable and seamless systems to support cross-border payments. Firstly, it’s vital to keep constant track of data protection regulations. These are specific to countries involved in E-commerce and tend to change the terms and compliance dates. Their violation may result in budget and brand reputation loss. 
 
The cross-border trade boom also means a greater number of online crimes. To make cross-border transactions safer and prevent cybercrime, leading payment providers started to introduce or, at least, consider utilizing biometrics and KYC identity verifications. To protect revenue streams and ensure customer security, online marketplaces may also need to involve these technologies. As well as international payment messaging standards like ISO 20022. At present, <a href="https://managedlei.com/blog/the-challenges-of-cross-border-payments/" target="_blank">70 countries</a> across the globe have adopted the latter, and more should join to provide interoperability and online purchasing security.

## Build vs buy in marketplace development

When it comes to marketplace creation, [custom E-commerce development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/e-commerce/) is always the choice. Yet it does not mean that all the functionality will be written from scratch. To launch faster, experienced tech teams opt for ready-made API-level solutions or parts of those to solve some trivial tasks and focus on those parts of the E-commerce platform that brings the most value to the end-users. 

It makes sense if marketplace development is seen not just as a platform creation but as shaping the engine that moves the E-commerce business forward. This option allows instead of reinventing the wheel and diving into troublesome and long-term development, to focus on what makes your business special and constitutes its core competencies. 

For example, if you run a cross-border marketplace, you would obviously need a custom solution for banking, payments, and taxes. At the same time, you can integrate a SaaS product for website analytics or email marketing. If your marketplace possesses a variety of products that are hard to categorize and the integration of the full-text [internal search](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/elasticsearch-integration/) is the only way to help users find the necessary goods, this aspect would require the most effort of your development team.

![How to make a build vs buy decision](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_development_build_vs_buy_f08f74e319.svg)

## Key takeaways

Recent transformations in the global E-commerce industry create multiple opportunities for marketplace development. Here are the main handy takeaways you can start implementing. 

- In marketplace development, consider buying existing components, many of which have become commodities nowadays, and invest in building what makes your business core value.
- Focus on the brand of your marketplace. The strategy of selling everything to everyone is in the past. It’s all about personalization and customization now.
- Collaborate with small regional businesses to evolve together and create mutual benefits. Apply thorough localization strategies. The commercial success of your marketplace across the globe directly depends on how well you can relate to diverse local communities. 
- When exploring new horizons through cross-border trade, do not underestimate the risks related to banking, taxation, pricing, and security.
- Embrace your customer's attention through multiple channels. Make your brand omnipresent and integrated into offline and online shopping.



Get the list of 5 major approach transformations in marketplace development that should help you shape your E-commerce business strategy for 2022.


5 shifts defining marketplace development in 2022

Get the list of approach transformations in marketplace development that will help you shape your E-commerce strategy for 2022.

mvp_mindset_main.svg

Although it’s hard to find any business-related person in the tech industry who would have little or no idea of an MVP, there is still a lot of confusion about its real purpose. And the more widespread its usage gets, the more misconceptions appear. 

To build an MVP in the right way, it seems sensible to conduct thorough user research, involve every expert on the team, and make sure all the key results are outcome-based. These are great practices. Yet, their combination in MVP development only makes you spend too much time and budget on what should actually save your resources.

Based on our experience in <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/mvp-development/">MVP development</a> for 15+ years, we’ve assembled a list of mistakes online businesses trap into and key ideas that help set a relevant MVP mindset and cope with this product evolution step efficiently for your startup success.

## What MVP is NOT

At some point, at Wise Engineering, we started analyzing why businesses with great expertise still experience pitfalls during the MVP step. Cooperation with multiple startuppers and business owners helped us define four main faulty ideas you might want to consider before the MVP development starts. 

### Not any initial development step

Not every business chooses to start with an MVP. And not every initial product development version is an MVP. In some cases, startups opt for immediate product introduction to the market. For instance, when planning an E-commerce platform, one may skip the MVP web development phase and launch the whole marketplace at once. While it’s their decision to make and this option is applicable in some cases, it’s worth saying they are lucky to pull through. 

So that’s when an MVP term gets its major misinterpretation. Not every initial product development version IS an MVP. MVPs are not created to generate profit or get first users. Even if it happens, think of it as just a pleasant side-effect rather than a primary goal or a rule. MVPs are not meant to have emotional design or are created to impress users. 

![Product development process with the MVP development step](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/mvp_mindset_product_development_process_2aa032041d.svg)

On the contrary, any MVP is a quick solution to narrow down your idea to the smallest version possible to test your assumptions. It has neither a product with an advanced tech stack nor broad functionality. Overall, an MVP is just the smallest, earliest, yet, verifiable option that registers the customer’s pain, proves the suitability of the solution you offer, and gives you proper feedback. The results are used either to pivot or to move on to the next stage of project modification.

### Not a minimum feature set

Despite its name, MVP is not about minimum product delivery. The definition of *minimum* depends on a particular project in a particular context to make this MVP meaningful. It’s about giving your users something, most often rough and far from your final version, to test. It’s about listening to their feedback and learning from it. Finally, it’s about iterating and driving new, updated (if not completely different from your initial idea) value to the end-users to get market traction. This is what we call validated learning that helps place the user’s needs and pains, not your app, in the center.

In a nutshell, *minimum* stands for solving early customers’ urgent problems from the very start by adding only those features first that matter most. So, instead of focusing on *M*, never underestimate *V* in your MVP. 

![Difference between an MVP and an end product](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/mvp_mindset_difference_MVP_product_19225efe60.svg)

### Not a perfect product version
 
Addressing ALL potential users with ALL best possible functions on ALL devices and platforms is a dead-end road. Trying to turn your MVP into an “ideal first draft” ends up being stuck in its development forever. Not to mention the cost of such a search for excellence. 
 
MVP consulting we do regularly shows that for many startup owners it is painful to weed off the functionality they think would be nice to have. Sure, as product owners they are tempted to develop the very best of what they have in mind. Yet, in the case of <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/mvp-development/">MVP development for startups</a>, it is not a sensible strategy. What makes a difference is their flexibility and readiness to pivot at any point. 
 
Your MVP shouldn’t test certain features but the value it can add or a problem it can solve. Thus, the fewer features your MVP has that serve its primary purpose, the faster the feedback and the more time and money you save for future iterations. A product with broad functionality and dozens of tasks to test is no longer an MVP as it cannot be reliable in validating or invalidating your ideas and takes ages to deliver. After all, such a down-to-earth and thrifty MVP approach makes sense as no project has unlimited time and budget.
 
What we advise is to think of your product as the one that’s constantly improving. Many companies release products with lots of great features that are never used or updated. This is not how great apps are made. Yes, MVPs will never have everything you dream they should have. However, once you keep iterating, this is hardly a problem.

### Not an end product

In fact, an MVP doesn’t even need to be a product to make the best of it. The intentions behind MVP development are to test the idea, see if you can sell the product-to-be (the *fake-it till-you-make-it* approach), collect feedback and/or the potential users’ database, engage prospective investors and receive (or not) their approval and funds.

Yet, many teams view an MVP as a half-baked product or the one that can be released earlier than expected. Once the startup owners attempt to see an MVP as something they develop and consider the job done, that’s where they fail to bring their idea to life. 

To make an MVP beneficial, you have to treat it as a process that you must repeat constantly. Define your assumption, verify it, learn as much as you can and use the outcome to make data-driven decisions with as little time, effort, and money as possible. Repeat that loop. Do better. At every stage. And that’s the only helpful strategy. MVP development is more like building a part of every app development stage rather than producing one layer at a time.

![what is an mvp](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/mvp_mindset_what_is_mvp_91f2734944.svg)

## MVP mistakes to avoid

Let’s discuss the most common mistakes a lot of startup owners stumble over, irrespective of the project type, scope, or industry.

### 1. Early tech advancement

It’s common knowledge that every startup is built to grow. Yet, thinking in advance might result in an overengineered MVP incapable of performing its primary task – test the idea with the minimum effort and resources (read: quickly). What you need is just to build the key functionality and not assemble a complicated and scalable tech stack from day one. The latter is neither practical nor cheap. 

If the tech stack is too simple, you will create a low-quality MVP not enough for initial users to test and give proper feedback. Yet, once you try to involve too much too soon, you might get stuck working months and spending extra just to find out the core idea, and eventually, will need another tech stack to implement it.

### 2. *I-know-best* approach

On your way, you will deal with vendors who provide MVP services. Our experience proves that whatever skills, brilliant ideas, or expertise an entrepreneur brings to the table, a project rarely succeeds if the focus is kept on the initial suggestions and any advice is rejected. 
 
If there is no collaboration, it results in a major risk of bringing that precious *so-good-in-theory* app into life just to find out it is something your actual users either can’t, don’t need, or don’t want to use. At least, initially. And that’s what MVPs are for. Reasonable assessment: to test, analyze and pivot when it isn’t too late. At this point, it’s crucial to stay open to the suggestions your MVP consulting team has. 

The I-know-best viewpoint is easily tested by a hard heart and a critical eye. The problem is, startup owners rarely have one for their cherished projects. That’s when MVP development services for startups come in handy. And even if you have a good development partner, it’s still difficult not to defend your initial idea or burn everything to the ground. What matters is to stay humble, listen, learn, adapt, and alter when suggested to do so.

### 3. Moving forward slowly

Startups have a major benefit: flexibility. They can pivot in a quicker and more stress-free manner than big market players. If you engage core functionality either in a small or a medium-scale project, it’s easier to adapt it or even start from the base one as soon as you get feedback from early users. 

Yet, competition plays an evil trick with startup businesses. Some of them still misuse the MVP benefits wanting to give their customers more. Overloading your MVP with irrelevant (at this point) functionality usually results in budget overruns, not meeting the initial targets, reworking modules that have no value to your users, and delays in the final version launch. 

The two common ways to see if you are making this mistake is to check how long it takes to deliver your MVP and its particular tasks. 

- The average period for a complete MVP is up to 3 months. 
- The number of key items on your list to validate is 3.
- The workload for an average task varies between 2 and 4 days.

These numbers are approximate. Yet, if you passed these marks, you are probably adding too much or even jumped over to developing the full product instead of an MVP. 

## MVP mindset components

To achieve commercial success with your startup and make your MVP work for the benefit of the final product, you need to think, plan and act in a fast, yet reasonable way. We collected a few tips that are always crucial to the smooth MVP development.

### Clear product vision

<a href="https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-top/" target="_blank">CBInsights</a> states that the startup owner’s inability to identify the market demand is the reason behind 35% of startups’ failure. To see if your MVP resolves the pain points and minimize the risk of going in the wrong direction, you need to:

- Define very specific assumptions to be tested
- Set accurate MVP goals
- Focus on the problems to solve

The more clearly you identify the product and its long-term prospects, the more accurately the development team implements it. The way you test it must be straightforward and simple so that you and your customers could easily check if it has any value. To make sure you are addressing the right problems, conduct research, map out user stories or cases. You can focus on a certain group, and not target a broad audience if it isn’t necessary. This helps you steer away from an over-engineered MVP, stick to the core idea and functionality, get rid of the tasks that don’t need to be validated at the initial stage, and make the MVP development process worthwhile.

Check out this case study on <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/podnods/">web application development</a>. It illustrates how precise requirements from the client helped us to deliver the app earlier than planned.

### MVP success metrics

To understand the product prospects, it’s important to rely on effective and proven ways to measure the success of your MVP. This validation process includes two major types of metrics you can involve: 

- Via qualitative metrics (rich text) you can get direct customer feedback through surveys, polls, and interviews, and use them to evaluate the user experience of the MVP. 
- With quantitative (numerical) metrics you can assess if your MVP solves the problem and is easy to use, check the level of engagement, and analyze if your marketing strategy needs changes. These metrics include download and launch rate, in-store positioning and user rating, customer acquisition cost (CAC), average revenue per user (ARPU), percentage of active users and paying users, customer lifetime value (CLV), churn rate, and more.

Whatever combination of indicators you and your tech partner choose to apply, do it before the development stage. These metrics help define the scope of work for MVP development services. What you measure in your MVP should be relevant to how you make progress with your startup.

The choice of the metrics also depends on the target audience of your MVP. If it is a focus group, select the relevant target audience. A group that includes the wrong number or the wrong type of users provides misleading results even if the metrics are accurate enough. If you are aiming at a broad audience, include the marketing costs into your budget to make sure the users are aware of its existence. Finally, if you need an MVP to prove the validity of the idea to your investors, you may need to include either of the previous audiences. The latter option serves as the showcase of how people can use it and demonstrate what you have next in mind. 
 
In a recent <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/blue-collar-lists/">cross-platform mobile app development</a> project, we created an interactive dashboard to help our client access the key data on mobile app performance in a convenient format and accumulate it in one place. All to help a startup company rely on data in their business decisions.

### Minimal marketable user flow

At this point what you need is to invest in core functionality and processes to provide more value now and in the long run. To identify such must-haves, analyze and minimize user flows you may have in the course of the startup development. The more minimal the user flow is and the fewer points you test, the easier it is to analyze the feedback and make the best of your MVP. 

To generate such reduced or minimal marketable user flows (MMUFs):

1. Create user personas and prioritize them to get the smallest (yet, viable) number you should work with using MVP techniques.
2. Create use cases and arrange them in user stories to focus on UX rather than a collection of features to build.
3. Prioritize use cases and break down user flows for each of them.

Such MMUFs can help you and your tech partner understand user behavior and dynamics, application logic, third-party integrations, and back-end tasks to fulfill later with less effort and resources involved.

After creating several MMUFs, crucial at the initial stage, you can move on to generating wireframes around each of these user flows in your MVP. This helps perform usability testing in a controlled research environment to record all the feedback.

One more advantage to this MMUF-based approach is the opportunity to track how every little alteration you apply influences or changes your users’ behavior. The latter is highly unlikely once you test two or more features at a time. Simplicity and transparency are key principles in verifying such user flows: minimum steps for users to take and UX design minimalistic enough not to overpower but to highlight what matters.

![Minimal marketable user flow](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/mvp_mindset_minimum_marketable_user_flow_svg_f1bfe67225.svg)

When we helped with the <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/core/">MVP app development</a> of the fitness chain platform, we applied the MMUFs approach, tested prototypes in focus groups, and adjusted the product based on the feedback. This helped our client launch a product beta with a really handy feature set. 

## What to expect from a tech partner

It’s quite a challenge to select a proper outsourcing development team for MVP engineering as it has lots of intricate aspects to take into consideration. These are the main requirements you should pay attention to while choosing an outsourcing team and starting your cooperation.

**Relevant tech stack**

Think big, start small. The tools and features your tech partner suggests should be good enough to solve the current issues and not overdo the tasks an MVP is to address. There is no need to focus on complex infrastructure or overload your MVP with features that are not essential at this step of idea validation. 

**Focus on minimum marketable user flow**

A tech partner who really gets the idea of an MVP makes sure all the members of the team and the startup owner understand the necessity to start with an MMUF. The latter is helpful in defining certain opportunities or possible bottlenecks, yet, not so time and effort consuming. 

**Basic security and system load settings**

Even if your MVP is tested by a minor focus group, safety comes first. Your users’ personal data, the code generated for the MVP creation as well as the initial idea are too valuable to risk them. At the same time, if you aim at a broad audience, your development team will point out the necessity of system load settings. The aim is to ensure smooth operation and no technical details getting in the way of proper feedback.

**Flexibility and adjusting on the go**

A flexible development team will not write tons of documentation for every button you may need. It will rather split the whole scope into epics and pivot, adjusting when it’s most appropriate or required. By arranging your MVP development into small iterations you can stay alert and be ready to adapt quickly. Flexibility helps the team reach high-level goals with an altered vision that relies on users’ feedback and new suggestions. 

**Clear roadmap and specific timelines**

Although MVPs are about flexibility, it’s essential to have a plan. Your development team should provide you with a detailed schedule of what, when, and how all the steps will be implemented. Starting from the very beginning and up to the post-launch activities. A roadmap and timelines help every person involved understand what milestones are ahead and stay up-to-date. As a product owner, you can use such data to make data-driven decisions for future iterations.

## Key takeaways

To embrace a true MVP mindset, make it a rule to dream big and apply an iterative approach to its planning, launching, and testing. Your MVP can’t and shouldn't be ideal. It’s neither an initial product development step nor a perfect end-version. It isn’t supposed to have the most modern tech stack or a maximum collection of features. What it needs is flexibility, precise goals, a clear roadmap, and well-defined problems your product solves. No matter how great or easy this idea might sound, its proper execution is what requires the most effort and true MVP thinking. 

An expert opinion on <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/mvp-development/">MVP development</a> can add real value and take the MVP of your new product to a new level. Contact us to discuss your business idea, and let’s find the quickest way to validate it. 


Based on our experience in MVP development, we’ve assembled a list of mistakes online businesses trap into and key ideas that help set a relevant MVP mindset. 

How to develop a true MVP mindset | Wise Engineering Blog

Check out the list of mistakes online businesses trap into and key ideas to set a relevant MVP mindset.

How to develop a true MVP mindset

site_search_main.svg

Discover customer behavior trends of 2022 and E-commerce site search best practices that will help you meet customer expectations and boost sales. Read more >>

6 E-commerce Site Search Best Practices for 2022

Discover customer behavior trends of 2022 and E-commerce site search best practices that will help you meet customer expectations.

6 E-commerce site search best practices for 2022

remote_team.svg

Management Practices

Working with teams scattered across countries and time zones is challenging enough. Moreover, the pressure doubles if the project requirements and priorities are unstable and new tasks arrive instantly. 

In this blog post, we are sharing our experience of replacing traditional approaches to project management with more flexible alternatives. Here’s how we organized work for design, development, and QA teams from the USA, Ukraine, and India and what lessons in remote team management we learned along the way.

## Challenges we met

It all started as a small project where the development team located in Ukraine and QA engineers from India worked together. Stakeholders from the USA had a basic vision for the project scope and tended to change requirements when the features were already in development. Within the small team, we managed to resolve all routine questions quickly via chat, adapted processes on the go, and the lack of long-time planning seemed like a challenge we could overcome.

Yet as the project scaled and more people joined, what seemed like a working solution turned into an organizational nightmare. New requests and tasks arrived every day. Most of them were handled by the Ukrainian team, which started work 3.5 hours later than the Indian Quality Assurance team. This meant the QA team needed to redefine their working day scope in the mid-day. No need to emphasize how stressful and frustrating it was for everyone involved. 

## Approaches we adopted

Stuck in the communication gap, we started to adjust project management approaches to the situation and looked for solutions that would allow us to work despite the time difference and our conflicting schedules. We implemented traditional scrum methodology and created a document with the list of all tasks the Indian QA team had to do during their working day. 

### 1. Updates prioritization

Very soon, the idea with the document containing QA tasks failed. The client expected us to be more agile and flexible than we thought. For example, the tasks that were of the highest priority in the evening got substituted by the other more urgent ones in the morning. There were also changes throughout the day. Finally, it was clear – we need an approach that would allow us to work effectively in this dynamic environment.

This is how we started dividing all new tasks into three groups:

- Big features
- Urgent small changes
- Not urgent small changes

Urgent small changes were implemented right away. Big features were discussed, estimated, and scheduled for further development. And not urgent small changes went into the backlog.

Prioritizing updates helped us start planning our work in the long run. We also were able to provide the QA team with ETA for features in development and the amount of work they would get. As for the urgent tasks, every sprint had a buffer time reserved for their implementation.

![Remote team management tips task prioritization](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Management_Case_Study_3_9e822a2f61.svg)

### 2. Daily meetings

Our initiative of holding daily scrum (stand-up) meetings failed as well. We received unsatisfying feedback literally from everyone. People complained about connection issues, unclear accents, communicative skills, and sometimes even about feelings of being unrelated to the topics (read: they were bored).

It was obvious that our daily syncs were just a waste of time for 10 to 15 people and this is why they got canceled. We initiated meetings only for the Ukrainian development team instead. This turned out to be very productive for us.

To address the open question with the updates for the Quality Assurance team from India, we experimented with organizing meetings for the QA team, Team Lead, and Project Manager. After some time, we analyzed the effectiveness of such daily synchronizations and decided to hold them twice per week. 

This is how the daily syncs transformed into the QA/PM meetings held twice a week and weekly QA/TL meetings. PM kept the QA team informed on the priorities for the current week, feature delivery dates, and plans for the functionality changes. TL, in his turn, talked in-depth about tech details and project improvements. 

![Remote team management](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/meeting_nobackground_5da6af6dc0.svg)

### 3. Slack channels

As the project started, there were two separate Slack channels: one for the development-related questions and one for QA issues. When a Project Manager joined the team, she was the only person following both channels and unintentionally became a single point of failure. 

Meanwhile, to clarify details, project members used direct messages that caused the lack of transparency. What’s interesting, we didn’t notice the problem until the new member who joined the team pointed it out to everyone.

Funny as it is, with the chats we did exactly the opposite of what we did with the meetings – we merged them. Now the QA team and developers discussed all the tasks-related questions in one Slack channel. This brought transparency and allowed the whole team to be on the same page.

![Communication in remote team management](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/chat_nobackground_c3a1b973d6.svg)

### 4. QA planning

When developing new functionality, the chances are high that new features will affect the parts not directly related to the ongoing project. With the agile development flow and instant feature updates, we were always at risk of bugs appearing in the most unexpected places. To prevent such situations, the QA team conducted systematic regression testing. 

Having an intuitive QA flow was enough for quite a long time. However, as the project grew and more features appeared, the quality of regression testing decreased. So we started a regression test plan – a document with an extensive list and descriptions of what and how should be tested, including the responses received. So, the QA team started to mark the tested functionality in the document and comment on the task.

This way, when developing a new feature, we also started to add a new test case for regression. Even though creating such a document was rather time-consuming, after it was ready, the teamwork improved significantly. And again, a person who initiated the idea of the QA plan was a new developer who joined the team a short time before.

![Delivering features while working remotely](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/test_cases_nobackground_7aa173240a.svg)

## Lessons learned

Today, you’re just as likely to work with someone from a different part of the world as you are with someone in a different part of your office. That is why understanding how to manage remote teams is this vital. Our Project Managers have vast experience in setting up processes for teams scattered across countries and continents, and this story is just the tip of the iceberg of all the things we’ve tried.

What is the key takeaway here? The truth is, there is no magic one-fits-everyone approach. Sometimes even the most popular practices don't benefit your team. So, start small and analyze the effectiveness of every step you implement. Adopt methods one by one, see how they impact your team, and customize them to your needs.

Here are also some handy remote team management tips for the start. 

- **Be attentive to feedback.** This is not necessarily should be an official form or meetings. People tend to talk about things that look wrong even if they are not asked. Your task is to gather this feedback and use it wisely.
- **Ask newcomers.** If the processes are arranged in the same way for months or years, you and your team do not notice things that can be optimized. This is when the newcomers’ option becomes precious.
- **Encourage everyone’s initiative.** Even if you’re a very experienced manager, sometimes your team knows better. Let them implement ideas. This will help them work better together and will lift the team’s spirit.
- **Ask questions.** Even if everything works well, always leave some room for doubts. There are always things you can improve. If there are a lot of problems, when looking for the weak points, try to collect as many opinions as you can.
- **Do not stick to one methodology.** Rules and guidelines are important. Especially when you only start. Though as you move forward, if the approach is ineffective, don’t stick to it. Adopt other practices, miх approaches, let them evolve, and select what works best for your team.
- **Be aware that routine affects culture, and vice versa.** Though it may look like they are not connected, very often the best traditions, as well as the worst, grow out from the daily routine.








Sharing our experience of how to manage a team when requirements and prioritization for the project change almost every day.

How to Manage Remote Team in Dynamic Environment | Case Study

Check out how to manage a remote team when requirements and prioritization for the project change instantly.

How to manage remote team in increasingly dynamic environments

communication_model_main.svg

At Wise, we believe effective communication is the key factor that influences the outcome of any project. Be it collaboration with a client, teamwork on the in-house startup, or the company’s employer brand initiatives. Yet, usually effective communication is hard to measure and even harder to establish.

In this post, we’re reflecting on how communication has transformed in the outsourcing sphere over the last few years. We’ve been developing our clients’ [custom software](https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/) and launching in-house products for over a decade now and observe some distinct transformations. Let’s discuss communication models in today’s software development outsourcing as well as reasons that forced the changes.

## Client-manager communication model

Usually, when browsing for an article on communication challenges while outsourcing you’ll read about time differences, cultural peculiarities, and poor language knowledge. These factors are, undoubtedly, important, yet, if you collaborate with an experienced and professional outsourcing team, rarely impact the project outcome that much. What then makes some of the projects succeed and others strive for existence? 

Over the last decade, the approaches to building and launching tech startups have evolved significantly. We no longer launch ideally implemented, bug-free products, plan all the functionality we’ll launch 3 years in advance. Instead, we test hypotheses right from the start, showcase clickable prototypes, get users’ feedback, and proceed with those products or features that get the highest evaluation. 

At the same time, the communication approaches in custom software development companies often remained the same as if we were still working in the fixed-projects-only reality. Historically, the outsourcing partner was hired for a set scope of work that had to be delivered in a specific time frame. The managers on the client's side used to communicate with a project or account manager from the outsourcing company who kept them up-to-date on the progress. We call it the client-manager communication model.

![Client-manager communication model](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/communication_model_client_manager_e916e8da6f.svg)

## Client-team approach to software outsourcing

With new approaches to product launch, flexibility became the key success factor for most startups. By flexibility, we mean the ability to pivot the project on the go, adjust functionality based on the client’s expectations and feedback. For this, the old approaches to communication between the client and outsourcing team simply don’t work.

That’s why it is vital for the startups who [outsource MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/mvp-development/) to be able to communicate with each member of the remote team individually. Because when an unexpected problem arises, people who are the closest to it can get the best solutions faster. That is what the client-manger model lacks – the ability to talk to the right specialist, the minute you need it. 

At Wise, we understood the problem of the communications via the manager long ago and rarely used it within our project. Today, what we advise our clients is to use client-team communication right from the start, no matter if it is a new product that we launch or scaling existing one with the new functionality. It does not mean the team operates without a project manager on our side (though sometimes it does), but that together with the PM the client can talk to the whole team or each specialist directly.

![Client-team communication model](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/communication_model_client_team_cc0172362f.svg)

## Two models compared

The infographic below illustrates how the business logic behind the startup development has changed. The key difference lies in the project planning and scope. You no longer need to know how to fully realize the functionality you have in mind, or have the comprehensive list of features you need to implement. Instead, you can communicate your business goals and key problems your product addresses, and together with your outsourcing partner decide on the best solutions to make those goals achievable. One condition only – to be able to create a product you’ve envisioned, engineers need to discuss it with you directly.

![Two models compared](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/communication_outdated_business_logic_ef347cf5e1.svg)

## Self-organized teams in outsourcing

Another phenomenon that was aroused by the change of the business development approaches, is the new paradigm for the outsourcing team organization and the rise of self-organized teams in the sphere. 

Usually, when this topic is discussed it is spoken of in the context of in-house teams. Though the covid pandemic has indisputably accelerated the remote-work trend and the way teams collaborate has been changed fundamentally. Self-organization became an even more critical aspect for all teams seeking efficiency. No matter if they work in-house or are part of the outsourcing project.

**What is a self-organized team?** It is a team whose members have the freedom to make decisions within their domain of expertise and not wait for their manager to assign tasks. A self-organized team has a clear vision or a product broader picture and does not expect detailed task descriptions in Jira. They communicate directly with the product creator and stakeholders and suggest solutions to the problem the management faces or users report. 

Simply put, this is a team that has the competence to accomplish the work without depending on people outside the team. Let’s discuss why this type of teamwork is beneficial both for the engineers and the business owners.

### From developers’ perspective

- In self-organized teams, people are mission-driven and understand the value of the product they build, as well as their own impact on its development. This also increases their level of involvement and promotes the ownership attitude.
- Engineers in self-organized teams tend to stay in the project longer as the process is dynamic and never becomes monotonous.
- When engineers take the responsibility for the decision they make, they are more eager to go the extra mile for their end-users. This helps them grow business thinking and changes the overall approach to product engineering. 
- Because each team member is involved in communication, the chances of spotting any miscommunication at the early stages are much higher. And it is always better to correct the concept of the feature implementation than to change the logic behind it entirely after it is almost ready.

### From the business owner’s perspective

- Working with a self-organized team you can finally minimize multi-tasking and micromanagement that eats up an enormous amount of time.
- With tech experts who handle the tech part, you can focus on the product strategy, hypothesis testing, and product growth that really deserve your rapt attention.
- To function effectively, self-organized teams should consist of experts in specific spheres. This also ensures all the tech-related decisions are made by people equipped with the best possible knowledge.
- With the clear communication loop established, all the people involved can take initiative and act faster. This helps to achieve frequent product delivery and fast product iterations.

## Wise approach to communication

Clearly, not every outsourcing team is ready to work within the self-organization paradigm, and the formation of such a team does not happen overnight. At Wise, we’ve been launching products for our clients for more than 15 years and noticed that to be able to effectively self-organize, a team should be working together for a significant amount of time. In our case, 60% of our teams work together for 3+ years and that’s the minimum time that is required. We also have teams that work together 5+ and 10+ years, and their achievements in self-organization are much more impressive.

Our project managers shared these handy tips on how to collaborate effectively with a self-organized team:

- **Minimize top-down management of tasks and activities.** Instead, you can build your cooperation model on partnership and strategic collaboration. For this, find a team that would consider your success their own achievement.
- **Do not confuse brief communication with clear communication.** Sometimes meetings last longer than usual. Sometimes an extra meeting is needed. The same as you now stay flexible with the project scope, adjust the communication schedule on the go. Our engineers usually request additional meetings if there are important topics to discuss.
- **Do systematic health checks to see if everyone from the team knows what to do and what is expected of them.** We usually do it with the *Roles & Responsibilities* exercise when each team member writes down what he/she expects of the teammates and sees what is expected of him/her. The points that do not coincide gets discussed.
- **Keep people in your outsourcing team informed.** The more the experts you’ve hired are up-to-date with the overall project situation, the more context they receive, the better solutions you’ll get on the outcome.
- **Clarity is the magic pill for effective communication.** Before you start moving forward with your outsourcing team, specify how you see the product development in the long perspective, how you measure success, what traction you expect, and what hypotheses you are trying to test. 

## Key takeaways

Software development outsourcing is a strategic initiative that allows startup companies to launch their product MVPs to market faster and validate ideas that will receive further investments. To succeed with the project you outsource, look for a custom software development company that’s open for dialogue, and would care about your product mission.

At Wise, we bring together engineers with deep expertise in [custom software development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/) and work in self-organizing teams. We’d be happy to discuss your business ideas and see how we can bring them in front of your end-users as fast as possible.

In this blog, we discuss communication models in today’s software development outsourcing as well as reasons that forced the changes.

New communication model in software development outsourcing

Learn how communication with the remote team has transformed and how it affects the outsourcing sphere.

security (2).png

Security

Global retail E-commerce sales are expected to reach <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/288487/forecast-of-global-b2c-e-commerce-growth/" target="_blank">$4.13 trillion</a> this year as online buyers converge on their preferred platforms to buy essentials, luxuries, and everything in between.
As online retail continues to gather speed, E-commerce platforms are being targeted by cybercriminals looking to hack sensitive customer information and scam unsuspecting people.
According to the <a href="https://pdf.ic3.gov/2019_IC3Report.pdf" target="_blank">FBI IC3 2019 Internet Crime Report</a>, global E-commerce merchants reported a loss of over $3.5 billion to cyberattacks. This is why online merchants must secure their E-commerce websites and establish robust security measures to safeguard their data.

So, how can you protect your E-commerce platform and protect customer data?

## Know the areas of your platform to fortify

E-commerce merchants need to keep tabs on several channels, including:

### Admin side access

Admin portals shouldn't be easily accessible from just about any IP address.

Ensure you lock down cPanels so only permitted IP addresses can access your servers. Next, check if directories have the correct permissions. For example, you'll need to remove all 777 permissions that allow virtually anyone to read, write, and modify files.

Want to take it a step further? Install panel notifications for unknown IP log-in attempts that will alert you and other admins of any suspicious activity.

### Get a reliable VPN

Financial transactions over public networks are vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks where malicious users attempt to intercept information being transmitted.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) offers the best security in situations like these. It encrypts connections to secure offsite servers, eliminating the threat of third-party users who may be trying to intercept your data transmissions.

If you are looking to save costs opt for SSL-based VPNs, these are relatively affordable and still offer similar security specifications.

### Infrastructure security

Hackers are employing increasingly sophisticated tools to attack and phish information from online businesses. This means you can't prevent malware attacks by simply installing anti-virus software.

It may be time to invest in powerful application firewalls that let you block communications from unknown domains, and help regulate incoming and outgoing traffic.

Similarly, plugins also help to watch out for and deny unauthorized access to your infrastructure. These tools offer selective permeability that grants permission only to trusted users.

### User data

44% of organizations reported <a href="https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/security/invest-cyber-resilience" target="_blank">over 500,000 customer records</a> stolen over last year alone.

This is cause for concern as losing personal and financial information of your customers can be the reason for a lawsuit and mar your reputation as a responsible business, discouraging others from visiting your site or buying from you.

This is a liability you want to avoid. As a best practice, you should never store customers' credit card information on your servers. In the event of an attack, this leaves their information unprotected and exposed to misuse.

You might expect clients to get frustrated by re-entering their payment information time and time again. However, they'll be more than understanding of this once you take the time to explain that this is crucial to protecting them from fraud.

Likewise, guide your employees on how to manage sensitive customer information, and ensure they adhere to mandated security protocols, like non-disclosure of users' personal data via email.

### Workspace security

Online retailers can (and should) secure their SaaS and cloud-based workspaces against data breaches. Given that your employees access and manage sensitive company data on the cloud, centralizing this information can shield you from data leaks and theft.

To add to that, requiring employees to people to use multifactor authentication can prevent unauthorized access to corporate apps and files - thus strengthening your workspace security.

### Personal training

Simply put, one of the safest ways you can avoid malicious attacks and protect your business is to monitor your site for any suspicious activity.

You can leverage monitoring software that tracks user activity in real-time and notifies you of irregular behavior (in the case of cookied users) as well as questionable transactions.

## Security measures to implement

![E-commerce cybersecurity measures](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/e_commerce_security_measures_9e81be2ddc.svg)

### Internal audit

Regular internal audits can help you investigate red flags and identify phony profiles. They also highlight potential threats to your online business, such as customer information scrapping, malicious attack footprint, business logic abuse, and more.

Some areas you might want to reviews include:

- Security perimeter
- Consumer activity
- Data integrity

### 3rd-party audit

Conduct an inventory of any third-party solutions you run within your business. Continually assess their performance, and if you're not using them, remove their integrations from your systems.

Ideally, you should aim to allow as limited access to your data as possible. If you're not sure where to start, external auditing services can help you assess the value of your inventory - and where you can eliminate threats.

### Employees training

More than <a href="https://www.csoonline.com/article/3153707/top-cybersecurity-facts-figures-and-statistics.html" target="_blank">80% of reported security risks</a> are made up of phishing attacks - which are also widely recognized as the top data breach threat to organizations today. It's also one of the easiest ways that malicious users can access your database and misuse both customer and employee data.

If employees can recognize suspicious emails, they'd be less likely to give up sensitive information in the wrong hands. According to Barracuda Networks, spear-phishing emails were <a href="https://blog.barracuda.com/2020/03/26/threat-spotlight-coronavirus-related-phishing/" target="_blank">up by 667% in March alone</a>.

Educate your staff about security best practices and inform them of how to defend themselves against spammy emails and phishing links left in comments on your website. Urge them to alert these IDs to management, who can then take action to identify and eliminate the threat.

### Disaster recovery

In the event of a data breach, the best security measure you can take is to make frequent backups of your E-commerce website and mission-critical data. This way, it becomes easier to retrieve information from your hosting provider and restore normalcy to your platform as soon as possible.

Ensure you have a plan in place for managing customer concerns and securing your business during this time, as you'll need to reassure customers you have things under control.

### Plan testing

As an added safety precaution, perform regular vulnerability scans across your E-commerce website and assess security gaps that hackers can exploit. This is crucial, especially when you're testing out new features and functionality before updates go live.

## Key takeaways

Research states <a href="https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/04/28/2023282/0/en/Arkose-Labs-Reveals-20-Spike-in-Fraud-as-Digital-Behavior-Shifts-During-COVID-19.html" target="_blank">approximately 445 million cyberattacks</a> have occurred since the start of 2020.

It only takes one successful attempt to access your database - and your entire business is compromised. Protect your brand and your reputation by evaluating your security measures and consider how each can be optimized to fortify your business against external threats.

Ultimately, offering your clients robust security in the face of data threats will help you build their confidence and gain their loyalty.


Learn ways to boost the security of your E-commerce platform and get handy tips on how to do it fast.

Cybersecurity best practices for E-commerce merchants

sales (1).png

The <a href="https://www.retailresearch.org/online-retail.html" target="_blank">center for Retail Research</a> published a report which suggests that e-commerce is the fastest-growing retail market in Europe. With the Coronavirus pandemic keeping millions of local businesses in lockdown, the global E-commerce market is undoubtedly going to <a href="https://www.statista.com/study/42335/ecommerce-report/" target="_blank">surpass 2 trillion dollars</a> by the end of 2020.

Many successful and aspiring entrepreneurs regard E-commerce as one of the most accelerated and efficient systems for reaching successful outcomes online. And to become a successful E-commerce enterprise, business owners will need to do a lot more than just identifying a product niche, set up a website, or advertising to potential customers.   Therefore,   they will need to improve their search in e-commerce to provide   "almost perfect"   search queries for potential customers looking for a specific need.

With regards to a recent E-commerce search experience report by The Baymard Institute, you'd be surprised by the outcome. Out of the 50-e-commerce website evaluated, 34 percent of search queries on their website don't usually reveal useful results, and 70 percent of those search engines on those websites do not show relevant product similarities.

![Search Query Support Among Top 50 US E-Commerce Sites (1).png](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Search_query_support_among_top_50_US_E_commerce_sites_72b947df27.svg)

Whether you manage a small online store or a big E-commerce website, ensuring your e-commerce site search is consistently enhanced to provide frictionless user experience is vital for higher conversion.

All E-commerce website visitors are unique. Some visitors already know what they want to buy, while others look for entertainment - surfing through the latest trends, product images,  description,  or checking out the information.   Nonetheless,   no matter the site visitors, whether browsers or researchers, you can use them to your advantage with your federated search information.

It's important to know that every element on an E-commerce site has a role to play for the success of the site, the same way different shoppers rely on various aspects on the site to shape their user experience. Extensively, online customers can be separated into two transcendent sorts: researchers and browsers.

Researchers are goal-driven shoppers to purchase soon. They already have the idea of what they want but will probably be searching for the most suited option from their search in E-commerce sites.

Researchers may surf through your website multiple times, gathering information before they decide to make a purchase.

On the other hand, browsing shoppers visit an E-commerce site to see what is new, famous, and what's on sale.

They go to their favorite website or a new section to stay up on the latest trends, window-shop for future purchases, or to kill time. Whatever the case may be, having people spend time on your site can be intuitive for your brand. If they are the excellent user experience your site has to offer, they'll be more likely to revisit your site when they are ready to make a   purchase.   While they are busy getting entertained,   you,   the business owner has the opportunity to gather valuable information about your visitor, which can help you turn those browsers into buyers.

Another intense research from the Baymard Institute suggests that E-commerce site search is undoubtedly found to be the preferred product finding strategy by shoppers as they perceive it to be faster than category navigation. In this regard, Effective site search plays a direct, quantifiable role in increasing sales revenue, so working towards improving and optimizing your product inventory will directly affect the success of your search in e-commerce.

When on-site search is compared to other metrics, site search is usually ignored. Business owners prefer to pay attention to optimizing personalized emails or landing pages. In contrast, almost all product-focused buyers use on-site search to hasten their buying journey on an E-commerce website.   And if your website happens to lack the efficiency and accuracy they want, they will look elsewhere.

Your on-site search plays the role of your sales team. Nonetheless, taking the necessary steps to improve your site search can lead to happier customers who eventually convert to real paying clients.

There are three primary ways shoppers can find products on an E-commerce site.

![Jeans_.png](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Jeans_5cdcfc2aa2.png)

- Category   Browsing:   occurs when shoppers surf through categories and narrow down to see the items they are searching for in the subcategories.
- Keyword Search: happens when a potential shopper uses the on-site search bar to find products using closely related keywords. The keywords can be short tail or long-tail keywords; internal, competitive, and industry-specific.
- Faceted Search occurs when shoppers refine their search by narrowing the results through search filters. For instance, it can be filtered into length, size, brand, or weight; this type of search filters can be searched on the Amazon website. It will be an excellent opportunity to integrate a solution that will help achieve your search goal - such as enterprise search, or database search engine into your faceted Search to produce more search relevant information to your site visitors.

Several factors contribute to whether shoppers can easily find products through on-site search. These factors make it easier to provide the nearest search queries to visitors, which include synonyms, predictive search, misspellings, and type-ahead. Big websites like Amazon have integrated enterprise search as a service software to ensure their on-site search is performing efficiently.

For instance, Amazon tries to find relevant, accessible, and informative content to provide to its customers. The website uses a sophisticated search algorithm that has one primary objective; bring shoppers closer to relevant products as fast as possible. Basically, the Amazon search algorithm works similarly to google search algorithm. It analyses merely search queries for relevant keywords and matches customers' needs with related products in that niche.

Aside from providing engaging value to its customers, Amazon has access to a considerable amount of data to use for search engine results. This benefit is linked to the fact that Amazon is a self-contained platform, gathering data from many sources and storing them within its big data infrastructures.

Amazon uses the A9 ranking algorithm, whose primary purpose is to deliver a spectacular customer experience, thereby leaving the customer hooked on the website. It achieves this by analyzing different pieces of information to determine the most accurate and valuable product to appear in the search queries. The algorithm usually considers the following criteria to rank the product according to search relevance. They include: keywords, customer reviews, performance history, delivery time, and, most importantly, sales conversion.

## Conclusion

Whether you are a small or big E-commerce website, the importance of search in E-commerce cannot be overemphasized. Search is relevant and improving search leads to better conversions and engaging shopper experience.


Learn how optimized internal search leads to better conversions and improves overall user experience.

How search affects sales in E-commerce

search.png

An E-commerce store without an in-house search is like a grocery store without labels. You'd be left wandering down the aisles of the store with the hope of finding what you are "searching" for by chance. For the store owner, this is a bad practice as some customers might get jaded before finding anything, and the outcome of this means no or little business. This case can also be applicable to an E-commerce store if we replace the offline attendants with the online visitors who use the search widget.
 
The efficiency of the internal search has surpassed the need for navigation on the website by users and has also become a great tool for the store owners. It helps to drive sales and increase conversions. 
 
The tech surrounding the functionality of the search widget is beyond the generic search present on most websites as this only gives results based exclusively on the search keyword. For example, if the word "shirt" is typed into the search bar, the search results are not expected to go beyond the word "shirt", and we could say this type of search is based strictly on the search keyword and not influenced by the user experience and the other factors.
 
![Copy of cases-image-1.png](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Copy_of_cases_image_1_57331e4918.png)
 
Currently, there are two main options that we will describe at a high level in this post. For most CTOs this sounds like "build vs buy" and in many cases. The decision depends not only on what is better but what kind of company you are in: are you a tech-first company or a business-first company.
 
## Building an in-house search for E-commerce

Building an E-commerce search yourself involves the configuration of a search engine, like <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/elasticsearch-integration/">Elastic site search</a>, ManticoreSearch, or Solr. There are a handful of search features to consider and scope when building an E-commerce search, for example, search types, autosuggest, typo tolerance, and many other built-in features.
 
These solutions provide a very flexible search platform. Setting it up can take a month at most, and this relies upon certain factors, for example, the number of products in the catalog. The need to structure and optimize data for search cannot be left out as it is crucial to the solution functionality. The data should be prepared for the search integration. This might include:
- Normalizing attribute values.
- Configuration of basic and advanced features that would improve user experience.
- Structuring and optimization of data then the ranking of search results based on their relevancy.

Pros and cons of using self-hosted search

![Pros and cons of self-hosted search.png](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/building_in_house_search_c2cdd352f3.svg)

## Adopting 3rd-party vendor
 
SaaS companies specialize in specific niches and always optimize their products to get excellent results based on the niche the product specializes in. They have focused on creating an efficient site search that possesses features like text auto-complete, spell checker, natural language processing (NLP), advanced stemming, and more.

Pros and cons of using SaaS

![Adopting 3rd-party vendor](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/adopting_3rdparty_vendor_b9503a7048.svg)

## Where to start?

If you are wondering where you should start while doing your research on how to improve search on your site there are a few questions to answer first. Do you know what problem you are solving or what goal you pursue? If so – great. If not, you might want to start by analyzing a few basic metrics to understand how your search performs and how it affects sales.

**Conversion Rate**

Conversion rate is arguably the most important metric, it has a significant impact on your site's profitability. When your website search functions as well as it should, it becomes a salesman that leads users to their desired destination pages. This way, search helps to engage and convert potential customers.

**Bounce Rate**

The bounce rate is the rate at which new visitors open your site and immediately click away without interacting with it. The lower the bounce rate, the better. A high bounce rate can mean several things and common problems include poor design, low usability, or high search time. This metric is a great indicator for improvement.

**Search Page Speed**

Page Speed is the amount of time that it takes for a web page to load. A page's loading speed is determined by several different factors. This issue can be solved by site search providers or the in-house development team.

**How Deep Search Users Go**

A lot of users get jaded after searching the first and second pages, so it's up to the search provider to optimize the search tool to bring results relevant to the keywords up on the search page. This data is very important to analyze while working on improving internal search.

**Relevancy Ranking**

The task of the search engine is to ensure that the best-matched results are shown up first. Search irrelevance turns into poor user experience and this affects sales directly. Constantly improving your data tagging, assessing site search performance, and tweaking your relevance algorithms will be key to search relevancy.

**A/B Testing**

This is an important tool that involves a performance comparison between two versions of software (a search results page, in this case). A/B testing can be used to determine which search changes to launch after monitoring certain metrics like the ones listed above. A/B testing approach will have significant implications for what kinds of changes you need to create, test, and then launch.

**Team Cooperation**

The last but not least significant thing to start with is building an in-house team for E-commerce development or hiring an outsourcing partner. Experienced engineers, data analysts, and marketers are required to work in an across-functional team. Look for people with an expertise-based approach that have experience with internal search integration and optimization specifically.

*** 
To sum up, the pros and cons of both options have to be considered in terms of how it fits the E-commerce store and the budget, among other factors. Choosing how to develop your E-commerce search, shouldn't be a decision to jump into. Start with defining what goals you want to achieve by working on search and evaluating all options carefully.
 
Wise Engineering experts provide consulting services on [custom E-commerce development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/e-commerce/) and will gladly discuss your tech challenges and business goals via call or email. 

Get handy tips on how to integrate in-house search to your E-commerce platform and steps to start.

Building an in-house search for E-commerce | Wise Engineering Blog

Get handy tips on how to integrate internal search to your E-commerce platform and steps to start.

Building an in-house search for E-commerce

05_cases-01.svg

## Problem

Nowadays search becomes a primary source of resource discovery. So having a modern search engine that powers it is a vital part of a marketplace or other E-commerce site. E-commerce platforms contain gigabytes of data, usually not well structured and being input by different sellers so searching within it is not a trivial thing.

There are a variety of site search engines and services built on top of them so it is not an easy thing to choose the one that will perfectly fit requirements and be a good platform for further search results optimization and improvements.


## Goals and challenges

- Choose between SaaS and self-hosted engines
- Flexible search results tuning mechanisms
- Relatively low infrastructure maintenance
- Reach search experience features implemented


## How Wise Engineering helped
We have created a list of available search engines and services on a market that fit the required goals. Helped to create an evaluation matrix with a list of required search features and tuning capabilities. Filtered candidates to 2-3 vendors and created a plan for further evaluation of search results, integration efforts and further infrastructure maintenance.


## Results
- Created a finalized list of 2-3 potential vendors to evaluate.
- Listed search features to be added with new search vendor.
- Planned further evaluation process, tools and KPIs.
- List regressions and workarounds if current search implementation has some specific use cases.


## Implementation process

### Evaluation matrix
First, we created a long list of search engines and services and combined them into a matrix where we’ve put features and capabilities we want to have in a new search engine or provider. Each feature has its weight so it sets priorities and helps to evaluate a final result better. Some engines/providers may have features implemented in a different way and not always meet requirements. In this case, additionally to feature weights we created another feature evaluation dimension with three simple states as “doesn’t meet requirements”, “par” and “exceeds requirements”. So if the feature we want to have in search is important (which is defined in its weight) but has “doesn’t meet requirements” value for it we exclude this search engine/provider from the further evaluation process. At this point, we had an evaluation matrix with only 3 engines and services left that met all the requirements we’ve set on the first step. It was a mix of services and engines to be self-hosted so we needed to create different evaluation and implementation plans for them.

### Sales calls and estimation
For services, we scheduled calls with the sales team and went over features we wanted to have, implementation concerns, etc. At this step, it was important to estimate an annual cost of search service according to the features we want, search rates, potential index size, etc. The final price was an important factor in final vendor decision making. For self-hosted engines, we calculated an estimated hardware quantity required to support the search. Also, estimated a potential ops time required to support search infrastructure which also leads to additional cost.

### Demo search results evaluation
There are a few more additional steps we took to help. We created a step by step plan for demo search evaluation. This plan included a mockup of possible search results evaluation tool to run side by side comparison of current search results and demo search setup with new vendors and services. We also created a regression list of features in current search implementation and possible workarounds in new ones. There were some domain-specific search filters and search query expansions that weren’t possible to port to every new search candidate, so we designed a workaround for them to make sure new search candidates didn’t get rid of some search features users may have been used to.

## Results

Evaluation matrix and further vendors evaluation process have been created. We planned tools to be built and KPIs to measure and prepare for a final search engine decision recommendation, regressions, and possible workarounds. A list of new and modern search features has been created, they will be implemented after a new search vendor is chosen and integrated.


Check out the main steps of the site search implementation and how the right tech team can help.

Choosing search vendor

email-generation.svg

Graph API

Product scaling

## Problem
Each user from the marketplace of 10 million users has an individual set of products that are recommended for purchase. Actual up-to-date data on products recommended for purchase must be collected, stored, and delivered to each user in a “Resources you may like” (RYML) email. A way to generate RYML emails with the relevant content and send them to users on a regular basis has to be developed.

### Goals and challenges
- Gather actual up-to-date lists of products recommended for purchase for each user.
- This data must be stored and then delivered to all subscribed users via “Resources you may like” (RYML) emails on a regular basis.
- Delegate email creating and sending sequence functions to email sending service.
- Maintain business logic of collecting recommended data and providing it to the email sending service.

## How Wise Engineering helped
The Recommendations Email Generation Pipeline solution was developed. It allows us to gather accurate information about products recommended for purchase for each user and store this info afterward for a needed period of time.
Results
- Information about recommended products is being accurately collected.
- Email Pipeline solutions gives an ability to transfer collected information regarding 10 million users to the email sending service within only 5 hours.
- Email sending service gets the information if a particular user has any recommended products, and can easily send that list in email messages on a regular basis.

## Background
There is a marketplace with 10 million users and each user has specific products that are recommended for their purchase. This information must be collected and delivered to the user on a regular basis.'

## Implementation process

To begin with, we focused on how to orchestrate composition of microservices and to queue extracted products’ recommendations data. Next, we’ve evaluated options for transforming this data into a format that is readable for third-party services. Subsequently, we’ve designed a way to load this data into an email sending service.

The following tools and techniques were applied to achieve these goals:

1. PHP script to go over all users to group them and chunk by task type (if it has recommendation or not). After that, assigned user ID chunks into queue.
2. PHP workers process the queue with user’s ID data and retrieves recommendations for each of them.
3. Elixir Graph API application exposes data on recommended products to PHP workers. Next, it processes products’ recommendation data and applies some internal rules and limitations on it.
4. Python REST API application generates product recommendation data for a particular user ID on demand.

## Solution

We came up with the solution and called it “Email Pipeline.” It starts with running PHP script to go over all users and creates a bunch of async tasks. Each task contains information about:
- User IDs that should be processed
- What kind of operation needs to be done

It may happen that some users do not have any recommendations. In this case, we have to clean up their data on the third-party email service. The rest of them should be updated with new recommendations data. This diversification happens on the fly and group users based on the type of task.

The tasks creation process also has a time ramp up feature. Task processing jobs are heavy and time costly operations. To mitigate that, pipeline services run on Kubernetes’ cluster with autoscaling, depending on their load. So, to make sure that autoscaler has enough time to ramp up the cluster size, we create tasks with ramp up time. We increase the rate of tasks being created in 1 hour. After that time, we spawn tasks as fast as we can as all services are scaled and ready to process increased loads created by task processing jobs.

While tasks are being created, workers start to pick them up and process. The process starts with defining the type of task. In case a user doesn’t have any recommendations, it goes straight to a third-party email service and nulls recommendation data for this user. If the user has products recommendations data, then we need to fetch it fir

To fetch this data, we call Elixir Graph API service which represents a middleware between tasks, or in our case, front-end and recommendation storage. Recommended products data itself is stored in a non-precalculated state hold by Python microservice. This service can multiply matrices on the fly and calculate scores for possible product recommendations and return the data to the caller. After Graph API calls and receives data from Python microservice, the data needs to be processed and cleaned up as this service just keeps the list of recommended products and doesn’t know anything about the user. The cleanup process means removing items that were bought by a user already, were wishlisted, added to the cart, or even seen somewhere else on the site. This information is accessible by Graph API so we can easily clean up recommendations we don’t want to be served to the user next time.

We now have information about the set of products recommended to each user in the task, regardless whether it is nulled data or new recommendations. The only step left is to transfer this data to a third-party email sending service. We will use API of the third-party email sending service to perform this.

As a result, the email sending service has the information if a particular user has any recommended products, list of recommended products if there are any, and can easily send that list in email messages on a regular basis.

## Results

The Recommended Products Emails Generation Pipeline gives the ability to transfer collected information about relevant recommended products concerning 10 million users to the email sending service in 5 hours. This allows us to send “Resources You May Like” emails on a daily basis. All tasks that are related to email composing have been delegated to a third party email sending service. This gives us an opportunity to send emails to all the users with one click after the info on recommended products has been imported.


Learn how our team developed recommendations email generation pipeline and what results we achieved.

Recommendations email generation pipeline

scheduled-emails.svg

## Why?

Our main target is to develop a system for sending large numbers of emails and then tracking users’ interaction with a received mail (e.g. opens, link clicks, unsubscribes, etc.) Users with large amounts of daily sends prefer use scheduling for sending use.

## Why we need scheduling

Using scheduling, instead of send-immediately flows, gives us several advantages.
- Better control for sending process
- If a user needs to send emails after his workday is finished, then he won’t be able to monitor the sending process and fix them if something goes wrong. With scheduling, users can prepare all emails for sending before the actual send date, and our ESP (Email Service Provider) handles the rest.Less resources required
- If you already have content for emails that you need to send (for example tomorrow), you are able to send the emails gradually. For example, if you need to send 5M emails at 8 PM you can start sending at 10 AM and continue sending in small batches the whole day. We collect the emails from our side and cover the delivery in time.No personal CRON.

If you have a notification email that needs to be sent after some time (for example, a subscription reminder), just send the notification to our ESP and we cover the scheduling. You don’t need to handle that case with personal Cron scripts.

## Problems that we faced when building scheduling

We propose pretty simple API for working with scheduling, but it’s not easy to organize simultaneously sending even 1M emails. We needed to think about scalability and our system in the future. We had to solve several problems.

- Proper storage for scheduled emails
- Limited throughput of the network for one process
- Split scheduled emails that were ready to send for different workers
- Syncing statuses of scheduled emails and avoiding duplication on send

## Proper storage for scheduled emails

We should able to filter “ready for send” emails as fast as possible among large amounts of records that don’t need to send yet. At the time we already used ClickHouse database as storage for our analytics events (unsubscribe, clicks, open, etc.).

Clickhouse is a column-oriented database that is used mostly for analytics. But with the read/write throughput that ClickHouse provides for us we are able to use the solution as scheduling storage.

The most valuable storage requirements for us were the following:
- Local and distributed joins
- Data compression
- Parallel and distributed query execution
- Cross-datacenter replication
- High availability
- SQL support
- Fetch speed not less than 500K email records per second.

## Performance testing

We made some performance tests and got results that completely satisfied our requirements:

- Read speed is 1.2 GB/s
- Write speed is 50 to 200 MB/s
 - Finding 335K scheduled emails on a dataset with the size of 5M takes 0.061 second

As a result, with network latency for transfers, we were able to fetch 3.5M emails per second. That was a very good result for us.

## Limited throughput of the network for one process

We resolved the problem of choosing our data storage and then faced another issue. We used NodeJS as our main platform, the platform, together with SQS queues, didn’t provide the desired performance for us. Then we wrote simple prototypes for testing using Golang and Elixir (we hoped that Erlang with its lightweight threads helps us) we got some throughput increases, but still weren’t reaching the desired results and scalable solutions.

Results of our benchmark’s queue inserting time for 50K messages to queue was as follows:
- NodeJS 1 thread = 95.408 sec
- NodeJS 2 thread = 75.757 sec
- Go = 35.564 sec

Elixir was about 2 times slower than NodeJS with 2 threads and the same kind of problem.
So obviously, we needed to find ways to scale horizontally.


## Split scheduled emails that are ready to send for different workers

Obviously, we needed to make our scheduling scalable and found a way to split all scheduled emails for workers. Workers should have the same role and know nothing about each other. It’s allowing us to run more workers on more servers when we need to process the largest amount of emails.

When workers are fully independent from each other, we decided to create one more component in our system.

The component is named Ranger and is responsible for splitting ranges for our workers. Each range shouldn’t intersect with other ranges.

With Ranger and Clickhouse working together, we created the following architecture for our scheduling feature:

1. Emails send to REST API, and if a parameter with a future send date exists, API puts the email to Messaging Queue.
2. Write to the consumer processing the Queue and save all emails inside Clickhouse database.
3. Ranger runs query for fetching emails and the query contains the following steps: Records filtered by send date and each time we fetch all records that are ready in that moment. Filter records by time-created range, we need only those that weren’t affected by the previous step. For that, we fetch only records that have a date greater than biggest date from previous execution. Aggregate results by CreatedTime and COUNT function.
4. Set first fetched date as DateFrom for query.
5. Wait for full batch size and set last date as DateTo.
6. Update Date to as last processed range.
7. Send range to Queue for processing by worker.
8. Consumer pulls a Queue with ranges and fetches by CreatedTime emails for sending to user.
9. Each email sends to target user.


![scheduled emails scheme](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/scheduled_emails_scheme_94e7ec9efe.svg)

## Avoid duplication

AWS SQS service promises not less than one delivery for a Standard Queue. this means that sometimes we can obtain one message on two workers and send our email twice. Since each message can contain multiple emails (our current batch size contains 5K) we need to organize duplicate handling.

For that, we have the Redis database and we store each SQS messageID as a Redis key. The keys have an expiration date that's equal to message visibility timeout in the Queue. When a consumer obtains a new message from SQS, he checks for an existing messageID in Redis. If the message already exists, the consumer skips this one.

## Conclusion

Using ClickHouse and AWS Simple Queue Service, we build a scalable scheduling system for delivering emails. These flows and tools can be applied to any actions that could be scheduled, not just for emails.

At the moment, we can fetch 335K records per second, filtering by ready date takes 0.1 seconds for 5M database set (including network latency), and workers that process the emails can easily scale horizontally for the desired throughput.


Check out how our team built a scalable scheduling system to deliver emails via ClickHouse and AWS Simple Queue Service.

How to send large amount of scheduled emails simultaneously

s3-file-upload.svg

## Problem

Users could not upload all their products to the marketplace because most of them were files that are larger than 200 MB or were video files. Both were not supported for upload; there was a size limitation for digital files, and video files were not supported at all.

## Goals and challenges

- Allow users to upload files that are larger than 200 MB.
- Enable users to continue file upload after the network error from user side has occurred.
- Scan uploaded files for malware.

## How WE helped

Direct upload of files to Amazon S3 was designed and successfully applied in the existing service (marketplace) within a shorter period of time than the upload system that was used before: half a month compared to 2 months. Moreover, it also enhanced security for downloaded files.

## Results

- Users could upload files up to 500 MB or up to 1 GB (depending on association with a specific user group).
- New items (Video Files) became available for upload.
- S3 server usage decreased the time and resources required for server maintenance compared to the hardware servers that were used before.
- The project received enhanced security of downloaded files.

## Background

Existing service allowed users to upload files and attach them to products. However, the service put a solid limit on the size of files that were selected for upload. As a result, it was not possible to upload a file that is larger than 200 MB. Also, it worked in a way that when a file upload failed (due to the network error), the user was forced to start the entire process all over again. A major problem was that many users had files usually larger than 200 MB. Consequently, there was a lot of requests to upload such types of files. Besides, the NGINX module which was used for file upload was very old and unsupportable.

## Implementation process

### Old upload schema

Previously, when the user uploaded a file, we used an old NGINX module. This NGINX module simply read all the content of the file and stored it on our server in a temporary directory with a temporary file name. The following problems emerged:

1. This mechanism read the whole file within one operation. This approach didn't work correctly for the big files and caused a significant load on our servers.
2. The unique temporary file name was not, in fact, unique. Sometimes, when we had lot of users on the website, we had conflicts when two or more users uploaded files with the exact same temporary file name.
3. Our upload progress bar displayed the upload process only. We could not add a progress bar for virus check, consequently users just saw a stalled progress bar while we checked the file for viruses. Also, we generated preview files, which were a reduced version of the original user’s files; because of this, users could not monitor the progression of the upload process.
4. After the upload, we stored all files on our own data servers. It required more attention from our side and resources to maintain them. Moreover, it made our codebase more complicated since we required some extra fields in the database in table item properties; we called it mask of servers, which contained information where a file for a specified item was stored. It increased complexity to select all items which stored files on specific data servers only.
5. This upload process was not secure:
- If someone hacked our system, they could catch and replace files.
- We checked files for viruses by Cron after the upload was completed. During the time between upload and check, an infected file could corrupt our system and harm other users who later bought the product and downloaded the infected file.

![direct s3 file upload old scheme](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/direct_s3_file_upload_old_scheme_a8fadb287c.svg)

## Solution

### New upload schema

We decided to upload files directly to S3 and no longer store them on our servers. Also, we’ve chosen to use a 3rd party JavaScript library to upload files to S3 directly instead of creating our own library. We selected [https://github.com/TTLabs/EvaporateJS.](https://github.com/TTLabs/EvaporateJS. ) This library had already implemented and tested features for all known web browsers:

- Secured direct S3 file upload.
- Resume failed file upload.

Now all files were uploading to S3 into a temporary bucket for each user’s item. Also, we used unique paths and file names. We decided to split files into a smaller parts before upload and run uploads to S3 in parallel threads, each part was signed by our server so it couldn't be caught and replaced by someone else. Now when a user selects a file to upload to S3:

1. Evaporate JS uploads a file into a temporary bucket directly. During the upload process, it makes a request to our servers only for signing each part of the file. This is done to avoid cases when somebody can catch part of the uploaded file and replace it.
2. After uploading files into the temporary bucket, we start to process the files in the following order:
   - Check for viruses: If a virus is detected, we stop processing the file, move it into a quarantine bucket (it clears automatically after 4 days), and notify the user about this event.
   - Generate preview files.
   - Collect information about the file (size, checksum, type of file, etc.).
3. User fills in required text fields and clicks on submit button.
4. Process push job of funneling item into a queue:
When the user wants to create several items, we organize all the processes into a queue. Once the first item is submitted for creation/update, the user is able to select the next one and doesn't have to wait until the create/update process is finished for the first item. Once the item is created/updated, we display a message to inform the user.
5. In the background, worker process takes jobs from the queue and performs the next job in parallel threads: Save item details into database.
6. In case the background saving process has failed (network issue, Amazon issue, etc.), the queue process always restarts failed tasks a couple of times.

![direct s3 file upload old scheme](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/direct_s3_file_upload_new_scheme_b28e226c13.svg)

## Results

The new upload process was designed and successfully applied. We gave our users an opportunity to upload files up to 500 MB. For premium users, we’ve added a new feature – files upload up to 1 GB. Also, we decided to allow upload of video files as a new item. This upload process was successfully applied in the existing service (marketplace) within a shorter period of time than the upload system that was used before: half a month compared to 2 months. The S3 server also was easier to maintain, and took less time and effort to maintain, compared to the hardware servers that were used before. Moreover, it also reinforced security for downloaded files.

Wise Engineering team helps businesses solve complex tech challenges like [migration to cloud](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/cloud-migration/), [internal search integration](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/elasticsearch-integration/), optimization for high load, and more. Check out our expertise in [custom software development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/) and contact us to discuss your future project.



Learn how our tech team developed a direct upload system to S3 and allowed users to upload large files to the marketplace seamlessly. 

Direct S3 File Upload | Wise Engineering Blog

Learn how we developed a direct upload system to S3 and allowed users to upload large files to the marketplace seamlessly. 

Direct S3 file upload

notification-system.svg

## Problem

The possibility to send a high number of emails without keeping your own server for email delivery.
Goals and challenges
- Track user interaction with the email (up to 10K notifications per minute).
- Reduce load on 3rd party app that sends high number of emails daily.
- Webhook receiver’s downtime shouldn’t affect main application flow.
- System has to be scalable and guarantee to deliver within one day, when hook target isn’t available.
- Convenient and timely email delivery status reporting and displaying this info on a dashboard.
- Service is easy to use and customizable to meet changing requirements.
- Availability and comprehensiveness of documentation.

## How WE helped

We've implemented the hooks delivery system with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and proxy server that processes, subscribes, and redirects requests. Little coding was required and responsibility of webhook delivery is assigned to an external service.

### Results

- Email delivery system with the user’s activity tracking feature that processes a high number of events (up to 20K notifications per minute).
- Information about user interaction with the email is captured and stored.
- Redelivery solution is available when webhook receiver is unreachable.
- System is separated and does not affect main app services.
- Solution is easy to scale.
- 2 times higher level of throughput.

## Implementation process

To achieve project objectives, we’ve considered several implementation options:
- Naive implementation.
- Implementation via SQS queue.
- Webhooks delivery SNS notification.

We have the following components that are responsible for events in our system:
1. Event consumer.
2. Pull queue and decide what we need to do with events.
3. Event storage.
4. Store all events in our system.
5. 3rd party app.
6. Have to be informed about events related to the app account.

## Native implementation

The simple way to inform a 3rd party API is just to make HTTP request the hook URL directly from the consumer, as displayed on the following diagram:

Pros:
- Easy to implement.

Cons:
- Main application flow is affected, thus if a 3rd party app won't respond, we will receive an error in our internal consumer.
- Consumer cannot be scaled separately from webhooks which are sent to 3rd party app.
- Impossible to implement webhooks redelivery correctly.

Accordingly, we came to the conclusion that this approach will not give us expected results or satisfy our needs in a comprehensive manner.

Therefore, we’ve started to consider other options.

![Native implementation](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/webhoooks_native_implementation_2f8d52c370.svg)

## Implementation via SQS Queue

We use a lot of AWS services at the moment and already have a bunch of SQS Messaging Queues. The main idea for the solution it is to use a separate queue for hooks (webhooks) and consumer to process this queue. Take a look at the schema that shows how SQS queue works:
In this manner our main app flow does not depend on the working state of an external app and we are able to implement retries via SQS queue.

The flow of a retry is as follows:

1. Pull webhooks events from queue.
2. Send HTTP request with events in the body to 3rd party app.
3. If request is completed successfully, then remove message from queue.
4. If request has failed, retry with the specified delay and send a message once again.
5. Set maximum receive count that equals delivery retry count.

![Implementation via SQS Queue](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/webhooks_implememntation_via_SQS_queue_abcecd5e9e.svg)

The flow is displayed on diagram below:
Pros:
- Main application flow is not affected.
- Redelivery can be easily implemented.
- Independent main event consumer can be scaled.

Cons:
- More complex to implement.
- Max redelivery delay is 15 minutes (since max delay is 15 minutes in SQS queues), thus we can’t make a logarithmic retry for our messages.
- Logic of retries and responsibility for webhook delivery has to be managed manually.

This option was way better, however, not all of our primary goals would be met by implementation via SQS queue.

![Implementation via SQS Queue general scheme](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/webhooks_implememntation_via_SQS_queue_general_c43aaf6c6e.svg)

## Webhooks delivery by SNS Notification

Another way to implement webhooks delivery is by using AWS SNS. The service was developed for delivering notifications and can send them via HTTP, the same way as webhooks do. Also, if notification delivery has failed, SNS is responsible for retry delivery, and we can use linear or logarithmic function to manage retry frequency.

This solution will give us desirable outcomes; however, it cannot be applied due to these two reasons:

1. SNS send confirmation requests to subscribe endpoint (webhooks destination).
2. SNS provides redundant metadata to delivered messages.

The SNS was designed for communication between different components within one system and not for communication among different components of different systems with different owners. Hence, we need a proxy component inside our system that SNS can communicate with

Let's take a look at the scheme of proposed webhooks implementation using SNS:

![Webhooks delivery by SNS Notification](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/webhooks_delivery_by_SNS_notification_ed2086657b.svg)

Flow of hooks delivery using SNS:

1. The consumer sends events to a certain SNS topic.
2. We subscribe a 3rd party app to the topic and the URL should contain an endpoint that we need a redirect for.
3. When the proxy receives a request for subscription confirmation, it will send a request to SNS with a proper confirmation token.
4. When the proxy receives a request with a notification (an event, in our case), it will format event data and redirect to a URL that contains the URL path part.
5. All responses from the hooks’ endpoints pass as responses to SNS requests.

Schema of proxy API is shown below:

Pros:

 - Main application flow isn’t affected by the state of the hooks’ receiver application.
- The responsibility for message delivery is shifted to SNS.
- Redelivery strategy is already implemented by AWS.
- The simple proxy has good throughput, very lightweight and can be scaled.
- Little code is needed (less code, fewer bugs).

Cons:
- The proxy has to be developed.

![Webhooks delivery by SNS Notification scheme 2](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/webhooks_delivery_by_SNS_notification_scheme2_1eb5d905fe.svg)

## Solution

After considering each implementation option in terms of benefit it will bring, and required resources for its execution, we’ve chosen to go with the webhooks delivery by SNS notification. With SNS and the simple proxy server, we’ve implemented the hooks delivery system with minimum coding involved and shifted responsibility of webhook delivery to an external service. As a result, we are able to send about 20,000 events per minute without any scaling, which is even higher compared to the planned 10,000 events per minute. The major bottleneck is the proxy, but we designed this one for scaling so throughput can be easily increased.

## Additional info

We wrote our proxy using Node.js platform. The proxy hosted on EC2 T2 small instance and can process about 4,000 concurrent requests with throughput of about 400 req/sec. The proxy doesn’t have any interaction with the database since all data for redirects are passed in URLs. This gives us an option to do a horizontal scaling. If we place our proxy behind a load balancer, then we will be able to add more server instances and as a result obtain two times higher throughput.

Vertical scaling won’t give us the same effect. When we scale node processes within one server instance, we can get about 30% higher throughput for each additional processor kernel. Therefore, horizontal scaling is a more suitable and effective approach.

We don’t need to worry about scaling SNS because AWS does it automatically, we only have to send the proper count of messages.


Here’s how we implemented the hooks delivery system with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and a proxy server.