A case study coauthored by:
Andrei Ismail, Cătălin Andrei and Emma Ungureanu.
SquashSkills provides online coaching resources for anyone trying to improve their squash skills. Video lessons for players and coaches of all levels, documentaries and blog posts, a planning tool, and a performance tracking tool are all available on the platform.
SquashSkills was looking for a new technical partner that would ensure their product kept up with business requirements and users’ needs. The company partnered with Vitamin Software to take over product development and maintenance from an existing vendor, and to make the transition as smooth as possible for all stakeholders.
Vitamin Software devised a thorough plan, performed a seamless transition, and continued to improve the solution. The performance enhancements and new features implemented by Vitamin Software enabled SquashSkills to stay on top of their game.
About SquashSkills
SquashSkills is a platform that helps squash players up their game. With technology making its way into all aspects of our lives, more and more people are becoming interested in improving their athletic performance with the help of devices, apps, and data.
Squash players and coaches can use SquashSkills to improve their abilities by watching instructional videos about all facets of the game. But SquashSkills is not just a video streaming service. Founded by two squash world champions, the platform doesn’t just provide coaching videos: it also offers instructions for practicing what users learn, and improving overall fitness. The platform helps users plan and organize their training, and enables users to track their progress over time.
Learning by doing is one of the most effective educational approaches, and SquashSkills uses it to the max. Users can subscribe and benefit from the knowledge and experience of SquashSkills’ co-founders and other squash professionals, no matter where users live.
“SquashSkills was created with the goal of giving everyone access to high level squash coaching, regardless of their standard or geographic location.”
Customer Challenge
The main challenge for the SquashSkills team was to adopt a fast-paced engineering process that would suit their business requirements and their users’ needs.
Because SquashSkills was present on the market long before similar services, their application was built on top of a custom Content Management System. But having a custom platform at the core of their solution proved to be unsustainable for SquashSkills in the long run. It limited the pool of engineers that the company could hire to help achieve its business goals. SquashSkills needed to find a new vendor that could take over the existing system, learn how to work with it autonomously, and develop it further.
First, the new technical partner needed to organize the transition from the previous vendor. Such situations are sometimes tense, and must be carefully planned in advance to ensure that end users are not impacted. This implies not only technical know-how, but also excellent communication skills.
Second, SquashSkills needed improvements to the platform, such as bug fixes, performance enhancements, and new features. This meant that the new vendor had to not only understand the technologies and infrastructure behind the solution, but also to be able to expand it.
"I feel very fortunate to have been introduced to Andrei and his team when I was. The timing could not have been better. We were going through a particularly difficult period at the end of a long and painful agency build. We felt badly let down and had a sub-par product that wasn't delivering for us. Vitamin brought a whole different level of professionalism to the project and were able to assist us as we looked to manage our budget and make the right choices.
Every decision was carefully thought through and the Vitamin team were not scared of pushing back if they felt we were choosing the wrong path. We have worked closely with Vitamin for a number of years now and have built up a close relationship. If I have a technology query Andrei is the first person I turn to. I cannot recommend them enough, they undoubtedly have many strengths but it was their ability to decipher clunky, legacy code and reverse engineer problematic parts of the website that really sets them apart."
— Jethro Binns, CEO
The power of planning: why SquashSkills chose Vitamin
Predictability goes a long way in building trust between business partners. The critical factor that convinced the SquashSkills CEO was our good reputation and our ability to formulate a solid plan for the transition.
Based on our experience, we were able to prepare a detailed action plan: from gaining access to the network, codebase, and servers, to checking dependencies with other components, to ensuring we can make code changes and removing permissions for the previous vendor. We support our clients in taking their minimum viable product (MVP) to Product-Market Fit, so we are no strangers to picking up where somebody else left off, and taking it further.
Apart from doing similar work in the past, we had another ace up our sleeve: our reverse-engineering skills. Over the years, we have come into contact with a wide variety of technologies and engineering practices. As a result, we can quickly figure out how a piece of software has been built – and most importantly, how it can be improved. Our portfolio includes a number of complex projects that we have taken over from our clients, one example being IFPRI’s AIDA that is described in this case study.
But our communication skills truly got the ball rolling. We explained the intricacies of the transition plan in an easy to understand way to SquashSkills’ CEO. Since Vitamin is a software development team with CTO capabilities, we leveraged our ability to communicate effectively with other engineering teams to ensure a smooth collaboration with the previous vendor throughout the transition.
Vitamin’s Solution
Just like a squash player needs a coach to improve their game technique, SquashSkills needed Vitamin to support transitioning their platform from the former vendor.
Our approach was to take things step by step. First, we outlined a transition from the previous vendor to the Vitamin team. Our goal was to make a seamless switch with zero downtime. To achieve this, our team took the following steps:
We got access to the application infrastructure and the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tools for production and other test environments;
We worked with the previous vendor to obtain all the available documentation, which we carefully studied and analyzed to understand how the platform works;
We performed Quality Analysis on the web application to become familiar with its functionalities, and reviewed the roadmap and backlog of activities from the previous vendor, to understand the status and progress of existing work;
We set up a monitoring system for the application and built a “firefighting” procedure to address performance issues and bugs identified through this mechanism. The firefighting procedure included a service level agreement (SLA) with SquashSkills to ensure a collaborative process that fit their business needs;
We mapped out critical services (DNS, Google Analytics, etc.) and their use, plus the routine jobs, and we updated the documentation where information was missing or unclear;
We ensured backups were operational for the production environment and documented the backup process, to be covered if a restore were to become necessary;
We set up a local development environment and updated documentation for the development workflow;
We ensured that the code changes and maintenance work could be deployed to production.
We were able to achieve the above steps in a matter of weeks, which minimised the cost of the transition.
After the SquashSkills platform was fully under our administration, we started implementing changes. Our initial focus was on performance. We installed Application Performance Management tools to keep an eye on the software. Specifically, we used New Relic to track key performance metrics, analyze collected data, and use the results to make page loads more efficient.
After performance, we shifted our focus to new features. For example, we helped SquashSkills comply with the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2). This European directive requires organizations to enforce stricter requirements for user authentication, so we implemented Multi-Factor Authentication.
None of this would have been possible without the Vitamin Engagement Model. SquashSkills worked with a Vitamin Project Manager as the single point of contact. Our PMs are great communicators and business analysts, so they understand what the customer needs and can easily convey messages back and forth between our engineers and the customer. Our recipe allows us to take over the solution, operate it, and maintain it, hassle-free.
The scoreboard: Results and Benefits
They say it “takes one to know one”, and we take it as a compliment. Vitamin Software is a startup itself, so we understood SquashSkills’ needs and quickly adapted to them. We know how important it is to move fast, so we apply an iterative approach when delivering a solution, to provide value incrementally, as fast as possible. Our engagement model is based on a short feedback loop for any idea that customers have, which means we rinse and repeat until everyone is satisfied with the results.
Having a clear transition plan ensured the SquashSkills team fetl in control of the solution. This allowed us to focus on the details and enabled us to become the trusted technical partner that SquashSkills needed, which has led to a long lasting relationship.
Last but not least, we provided peace of mind to the SquashSkills executive team. With the help of the Vitamin Engagement Model, we were a one-stop-shop for the company. Although our clients work with a single Project Manager, our team has the necessary skills to implement changes of all types: Front-End, Back-End, DevOps, and more.
Next Steps
The partnership between SquashSkills and Vitamin Software has lasted for several years, and is still going strong. We have just finished migrating their infrastructure to Amazon Web Services. As an AWS Partner Network Select Consulting Partner, Vitamin Software is helping SquashSkills reduce their maintenance costs and increase the reliability of their resources by moving to AWS.
Vitamin Software will continue to be SquashSkills’ technical partner through their post-pandemic journey, by supporting them as they regain momentum after restrictions are lifted across the world and players go back to the squash court.
About Vitamin Software
A product development agency, Vitamin Software specializes in taking over your product and supporting it until it reaches Product-Market Fit and beyond. The customer leads and we drive the product to follow.
Vitamin Software is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network Select Consulting Partner and is Cyber Essentials Plus certified. We specialize in building, operating, and maintaining robust and secure products.
Vitamin Software builds bridges: From problem to solution, from difficult to feasible, from impossible to outstanding.
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