Client project

Meet naoo

naoo aims to solve the problem we have in the offline both as customers and merchants. To find and interact with each other, in a way that is personal. Imagine you would have something similar to Google Maps but it knows you, it also takes into account all kinds of external factors like time, weather, date, your schedule and what's available. Moreover, it knows your habits and preferences so it can easily and quickly find what matters to you in the sea of endless alternatives and offers merchants have. You just see those that are interesting to you and those that are relevant. This needs a lot of data as well as trust that your data is going to be used for you and not like we are used to today online where we are bombarded with ads.

Our responsibilities and deliverables in this project

CTO-as-a-Service. Tech lead and advisor to the business side to line up business strategy, vision and tactics with our technical roadmap and capabilities. Responsible for the delivery of the entire platform as well as to be available as expert advisor to all other domains from business to marketing and sales.
From ideas to technical concept design. Taking ideas, breaking them down and discussing them to fully understand the business value, user value as well as how to best approach from a technical perspective. Daily activity from the start to support the business side to quickly understand how things can work, alternatives, trade-offs and thus quickly navigate how to best move forward. Extremely important activity to keep everyone in the clear.
Business strategy into a product roadmap. Translating the vision and business strategy into a product strategy and roadmap as well as adjusting it in a very agile manner as we moved forward. This is a very hard thing to do in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) environment, however, we work well under these circumstances and step up and lead things forward.
Product management. Responsible for the end to end product management, creating increments of work, user stories and leading the team to navigate and understand how to best slice and dice items to fit and be easy to schedule and prioritize on the go. Again, something we do well even if the environment is VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity).
Solution architecture for the AWS Cloud. Architecture for the entire solution on the AWS Cloud. All infrastructure as well as software services. Security, simplicity, scalability and low cohesion in a way that we can move fast and evolve as well as we're building out more and more testing.
Building the engineering team. Hired and put together a small and effective engineering team for design, web, mobile, backend and ML. Couching and mentoring to get everyone up to speed and work with the flexible agile engineering practices in a challenging project and timeline.
Backend engineering. Engineered the entire backend system on top of a serverless AWS Cloud infrastructure. Backend services across Docker containers and AWS Lambdas utilizing programming languages Golang, Python and Javascript. Very high degree of automated testing to ensure that we can keep moving fast forward and not end up breaking and fixing other things. We evolved in multiple rounds the testing capabilities in order be increase the speed to run the many, many thousands of tests across unit, integration and system testing that we put in place.
Automation of deployments. Pushing the envelope what is normal with a 100% automation and pipelines for the entire product landscape. This includes of course Infrastructure-as-Code with AWS CloudFormation, all software backend, web, and mobile apps as well as all legal(!) documents in the same manner. All across three deployment environments (Dev, Test and Prod) and a very high degree of automated testing the ensure a very high quality level. This is the basis for a very lean agile software development team.

Timeline

2018

Initial advisory and demo

In early 2018, starting from an idea and a vision what this platform is about, we laid out concepts related to the overall architecture, product and even blockchain as well as how it all could work.

Responsible for building the initial core team, connecting a few service providers and delivering a demo version for the app in order to target further investments and partnerships.

2019

MVP and golive

Buildout of the backend on AWS cloud to support the MVP of the mobile app as well as securely provide the website.

We architected and engineered the entire backend from scratch, aiming for 100% automation across everything and a lot of automated testing to support us moving forward in a very fast manner. This was key to successfully delivering the platform in order to go live end of 2019.

At this point we had all pipelines automated from mobile development to backend and infrastructure. We even included our lawyers to do all their work on legal documents like privacy policy and terms through the same way as all the other engineers!

2020

Platform buildout and official Zürich launch

Buildout of major features and supporting sales as well as preparing for the launch that was aimed to happen in March 2020 just when Corona became an issue. The launch was postponed and will be at a later stage.

The app is live in Zürich, Switzerland and you can all download and test it out!