How We Work
Our Engagement Model
Boltmade works with an Agile practice where we engage in product development work for our clients. The heart of our approach is weekly development iterations, which provide accountability via weekly demos and planning, as well as regular release & milestone planning. Our approach also provides flexibility as the scope and team can change as needed.
Project Teams
We generally start a project with a team of two. It might be a pair of designers, or a designer and a developer, or a pair of developers. If needed, a team might expand over time.
We like the team of two because we can make a lot of progress quickly with a team of that size, while remaining nimble and flexible enough to respond quickly to changing needs on a project. As well, there is some real power in developers pairing to write code that makes the team size pretty magical, and there are similar benefits to design pairings.
Every project has a point on the Boltmade side who is responsible for:
- Creating a project brief.
- Maintaining communications between Boltmade and client (but is not the sole communication point).
- Setting dates for milestone planning every 4 weeks.
- Setting weekly sprint meetings.
- Ensuring that retros happen.
On the client side, every project needs to have a product owner. Depending on a client’s familiarity and/or comfort with Agile, we may need to provide strong support for the product owner. In extreme cases we may have to do a lot of the things that a product owner should be doing, such as helping with maintaining and prioritizing a backlog (though always in close cooperation with the product owner).