Tag: remote development

Case Studies

Case Study: Revinate – Development of a Hotel Guest Platform

In 2015, Revinate partnered with Mismo to recruit, onboard and nurture a Latina America-based team of software developers that could meet Revinate’s needs. Revinate’s Mismo team continues to develop and improve on a state of the art hotel guest platform for hoteliers that includes CRM and reputation management modules. The platform allows hoteliers to gain deeper insights into their guests, market to them at optimal times, get real feedback, track their online reputation, and build robust and meaningful reporting.

“With Mismo, we have been able to quickly scale our engineering teams with highly skilled developers that know how to deliver products,” said Jason Standiford, CTO for Revinate. “We can make product updates faster and more cost-effectively with our team in Latin America. They really are an extension of Revinate and a long-term part of our product road map.”

 

About Revinate

Revinate is headquartered in San Francisco, with additional locations in Amsterdam and Singapore. The company chose Mismo because it is a full-service platform with expertise in recruiting, onboarding and nurturing engineering talent in the Latin American market. Mismo’s founders and teams have a deep understanding of the challenges tech companies face, and what it takes to succeed in the Bay Area startup scene and global markets everywhere.

Revinate’s biggest challenge before working with Mismo was speed to market. The company had a solid product road map and could see market opportunities that fit with its core capabilities and wanted to expand its product suite at a much faster pace to take advantage of those opportunities. With a need for developers in a convenient time zone to speed up the product road map, the Revinate team interviewed candidates and quickly hired three Mismo team members. The onboarding process was fast, with the Mismo team fully up to speed on Revinate’s platform, tech stack and development cycles in less than 6 weeks.

Technology and Capabilities

Mismo had the talent pool to meet Revinate’s needs. As with all clients, Mismo handled recruiting, hiring and onboarding — arranging all interviews and coordinating the hiring and onboarding processes. Coordinating in-person travel as needed is also a specialty of Mismo’s and helped kickstart Revinate’s team so they could start producing fast.

At first, Revinate’s Mismo team was tasked with expanding and improving their reputation management module and building a tool that helps hoteliers compare their hotel ratings to other, similar hotel’s ratings across multiple sites. Improvements were made quickly, adding efficient features for complex surveys, in-depth reporting and flexible solutions to enable hoteliers to better understand their customers.

With the product road map for the reputation management module back on track, Revinate and its Mismo team shifted its focus to expand the CRM module. The teams improved segmentation capabilities, generated robust customer insights and targeting features.

Today, Revinate and Mismo’s focus has expanded to further improve the architecture of the platform. Modernizing the tech stack to achieve better security, improved scalability and sustainability to reach the goals of the organization. Revinate’s Mismo team is enhancing the platform while improving the underlying architecture and the process of development.

Originally, Revinate’s platform was originally built on PHP & JQuery. The Mismo team is migrating the platform to React, Java and Apache Kafka, breaking the monolith into microservices. Using microservice architecture allows companies to improve fault isolation on their platforms, have a better understanding of their platforms, deploy new features more efficiently and develop greater platform scalability.

Processes

Revinate’s business goals are what drives its Mismo team. The teams grow together, improve each other and continue to accomplish goals as one cohesive unit.

Revinate’s Mismo team meets with Revinate’s product owner, director of engineering, team leads and development team every week — sometimes multiple times a week. These meetings keep everyone on the same page and ensure accountability. Revinate’s Mismo team has gone to San Francisco several times to meet team members in person, and developers and leads from Revinate have gone to Costa Rica to work with the Mismo team directly for periods of time. They know each other, and they trust each other.

Being fully integrated with Revinate’s development process means that both teams can work toward the same goals. This level of integration is what makes Mismo different, what makes Mismo’s people your people, and what makes all the difference for success.

With Mismo, as is the case with Revinate, we don’t just do a project and move on. We are a unique platform, conducive to long term partnerships, growing with our clients and adapting along the way. Mismo helps companies recruit, onboard and grow remote software engineering teams that are based in the Latin America market quickly and easily. Mismo and its partners accomplish broad organizational goals by truly integrating to become a cohesive team. Mismo grows with you, we understand your needs, and we continue to tackle new challenges and make improvements that benefit your company’s goals.

Mismo is your long term solution for hiring and growing your remote development team.

 

Fully Integrated Team Members, Building Connections Every Day

Remote Teams

White Paper: Remote Teams

As we near the end of 2020, one thing that remains clear in a fuzzy, pandemic year is that working from home and remote work is here to stay. What started as a temporary environment change for many employers, is now turning into an extended, permanent or new option for the vast majority. While employees may still be working on how to perfect the work from home space, employers are working to perfect the new norm for remote work habits and policies. 

Studies have shown that employees are more productive and efficient from the comfort of their own home, but they likely miss out on the interaction with their co-workers. On the opposite side, employers face concerns not only with accountability but with ensuring their employees are receiving enough support to progress and grow professionally. For companies that are still hiring, they may be struggling with virtually onboarding new employees for the first time. 

But if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we need to adapt – and we’re great at doing it. Mismo has over ten years of experience with integrating remote development teams. From remote team building to onboarding remote employees, we ensure responsibility, accountability and, above all, inclusivity. 

 

Benefits of Remote Work 

Benefit #1 – Bigger fish in the sea 

If you’re hiring remote teams for the first time, you may be surprised to see that there’s a major difference in the talent pool. Because you are allowing your employees to work remotely, you will receive applications from a much larger geographic area who are interested in the position, but don’t want to or can’t relocate. The larger talent pool may make it harder to narrow down your candidates, but it also gives you the chance to find the skillset you need at a price that may not exist locally. 

 

Benefit #2 – More whistlin’ while you work 

Remote workers are more productive and get nearly an extra day’s worth of work done every week. There are many reasons for this; the office may have too many distractions or employees may find their most creative hours are not the normal work day hours so they churn out work at different times. Plus, meetings don’t take as much time out of the day because those Zoom calls stick to a better schedule, often have strict agendas and are thus more meaningful to overall productivity.

 

Benefit # 3 – We can get some… sa-tis-faction 

Nearly 90 percent of human resources professionals say that the flexibility of remote work has led to improved employee satisfaction. It helps employees maintain a better work-life balance, influences open and honest communications with co-workers and managers and, perhaps most importantly, establishes higher loyalty and retention rates. 

 

Benefit #4 – A dollar saved is a dollar earned 

Though you likely have to provide the appropriate equipment for your employees to do their work, at the end of the day, both parties are seeing a reduction in overhead costs. For the employer, you are likely spending less money on office supplies or even space. For the employee, transportation, food and wardrobe costs are likely less. 

 

How to Build a Remote Team 

Whether you are just now switching over to remote work or you are getting ready to expand your team, here are a few tips for onboarding remote employees. 

  • First, define and understand in great detail what your hiring needs are. Establish a finite job description for each role needed to complete your project or meet your bottom line, thus creating responsibility and accountability. Be sure to include business goals, budget, the type of roles and a timeline.
  • Once you have your remote team roles planned out, give Mismo a call to begin the hiring process. Specializing in hiring remote development teams, we’ll eliminate the need to post applications on your website, LinkedIn or Indeed. Mismo vets candidates, implements coding and design tests and even conducts candidate interviews. Our goal is to fulfill your needs from hiring to onboarding and beyond.
  • After selecting your candidate and getting their paperwork signed, plan the first week of their job to include one-on-ones with the team members they will work closest with.
  • If it’s safe and possible to do so, offer an in-person tour of the office even though they may be working remotely permanently. If your new employee is out of the area, offer a Zoom tour of the space.
  • Establish goals, performance reviews and frequent check-ins. Because you may not interact with the person on a daily basis, frequent check-ins will be necessary until the employee is fully-integrated. Invite them to your recurring stand-up meetings as you would with your locally-based teams. This will ensure they are not feeling overwhelmed or lost with their new role.
  • Schedule in some fun, remote team building. Just because you’re not in the office together, doesn’t mean you can’t have a Happy Hour or team lunch. Consider sending out GrubHub or Uber gift cards to the team to order lunch and meet up for non-work-related fodder. Because it’s harder to establish relationships with no face-to-face meetings, it might be up to the leaders to build the rapport amongst your teams. 

 

Since 2010, Mismo has helped companies recruit, onboard and nurture talent in Latin America. We have provided tier-1, cost-effective talent to tech companies that seamlessly integrate and grow with already existing teams. As an entrepreneurial team rooted in the startup community, we understand your needs because we’ve been there. Now, more than ever, we want you to find success in the remote work world.