Bob Hubert of Creative Contact writes: "It sort of amazes me that just 5 months ago we started to put this site together and we have completed a credible, professional and altogether good looking product.  My hat is off to you and your whole team."

Creative  Contact is a site where designers, photographers, designers,filmmakers, and other artists can post galleries, find gigs, and collaborate on projects.

Bob Hubert, the founder, is an experienced entrepreneur who runs a company called Spec that builds biotech factories, and in his spare time takes photographs.  In this case, Bob hooked up with Fresh Tilled Soil, a design firm that we often collaborate with.

You might be interested in the stages that we went through to deliver a web product, because it demonstrates some of the ways that we minimize delays at each step.

Proposal: This was a short phase, a few days, because we already had a mockup - HTML representing the site features.  I looked at it, determined we could get something out in 8 weeks, and quoted a fixed weekly rate for a specific team structure.  In our methodology, we give you a team, a number of weeks, and a weekly rate.   Then, we deliver a release in the time available, and we cut features to fit the time.  We never negotiate a fixed deliverable, because this takes a long time to specify, and the start of the job is delayed.  So, from the beginning, we are working to eliminate delays in getting to a release.

Roadmapping:  Usually, we do a roadmapping session, in which we make a list of features, sort them by priority, and try to find a minimum useful beta release.  In this case, all of the features were represented in the mockup.  FTS likes to make an HTML mockup that represents the complete product vision.  I selected a subset of the items for implementation, and got Bob's agreement on that.

Setup: The first week we deploy a reduced-size team.  The technical lead has to make some architecture decisions, set up the code skeleton, and build a staging server.  Usually, a designer also works during this time.  We build the team around the technical lead.    At the beginning of this project, we assigned some new guys on trial jobs, so there were more team members than planned, and we used the project to qualify some new developers.

Incremental releases: We put the development team to work on tickets with weekly releases.  The Creative Contact team was involved in testing the weekly releases, and they learned to write tickets to get what they wanted.  This is the bulk of the work, but it flowed smoothly.

Stop!  Bob called us up and said "I need you to completely stop development for a few weeks while I show this to some people and do some marketing".  This happens on almost 100% of the short-cycle development projects.  Nobody actually expects to have a product in eight weeks.  We get into week 6, and we start ramping up the analytics, the blog, the user forums, and the other operating apparatus, and it becomes clear that there will have to be a launch process.  Our customers usually want a break to organize that.

Commercialization: We did testing and small changes with a small group of users during the summer.  Bob arranged to launch the product with special deals for a set of art schools, so the first big batch of users came in at the end of the summer.  We ramped up up development team at about half the original size (2.5 instead of 5 people) to handle changes required by these users, to tune the marketing on the site, and to finish the for-pay "Professional" features.  This second round of development also lasted about 8 weeks.

We don't often post testimonials for the consulting side of the house because we don't want to steal attention from the other great consulting firms using Assembla.com.  Also, we are often in one of two situations that keep us quite.  The first situation is rescuing a project that has lagged for a long time without a release.  The second situation is where we are building a product for a company that will need further financing.  In that case, we have to work on building an in-house team that will be an asset of the company, and we need to let the new team assume leadership.  So, thanks to Bob for giving us this opportunity to explain how an Assembla development engagement can work.