Podium Project Journey

This project goal was to make the users lives better by giving them access to much easier tools to create the best and most profitable automations. With this new product the automation is much more visible and can be understandable by any employee in the clients team. It gives you the bird view of the flow but with easy access to the finest small details. As we got this new requirement from the product team our wheels started turning and think what are the best ways to build and visualize it. We started exploring all the different available tools and surely as the rest of JavaScript echo system there are a lot… We started exploring different frameworks and libraries like D3, other OS libraries and even several commercial projects. In the end we decided to “draw” the graph by ourselves with SVG and React as the “data manager”. The connection between the two was quite simple, much simpler then we thought. The only obstacle was to start thinking in svg and not as we were use to with html. Now after playing around with different tools and technologies we needed to create a simple POC (proof of concept). This step was quite interesting as we got to discover some caveats along the way and we needed to make sure how to handle them so we could have some POC to show. Now after the successful POC demo we need to start planning on the steps for reaching the initial Alpha version. We worked with design to get the mockups. Then started planning the building blocks in our code like different nodes, connectors, action buttons, modals and more. As we were quite deep inside the rabbit hole of our product creation, we got some feedback from product that we want to change it quite drastically. It surely was hard at the start but luckily the code we built at the start was quite flexible. The pivot change was relatively easy… luckily. Right here we got our Alpha version and sent it out to some of our great clients. They were happy to be first trying the new product and to give us their feedback or ideas from there perspective. On our side we got a lot of great comments, future requests and most importantly questions on when is it going to launch? This product on my perspective is going to be a quite big selling point for the company and it will have so many other use cases and features that I cant even think of now. As other employees in the organization and other customers get a hold of the product their minds start to wonder to unknown places and generate new requests and new ideas that sounds so powerful. Tech stack wise I don’t see any reason for us moving from where we are now, as the code is quite solid but we are always open to new items that could improve the usability and speed for our customers.