Sometimes we get questions about product development work at RebelMouse. I’m here to shed some light on our processes and how it all works.
To start, we have two main development teams at RebelMouse: Our platform team, and our agency services team.
The platform team develops the core product features that the agency services team and our clients use to develop specific digital experiences or deliver website-specific features.
For example, Feed Builder is a feature that our platform team built and it can be used to customize all sorts of feeds and sitemaps. Our agency services team uses this tool to help deliver specific content feeds to channels like SmartNews or MSN.
It’s important to understand that our teams have different release cycles, mainly because they have different impacts: One is on individual sites, while the other is on our platform itself.
The new features our platform team releases are based on the feedback that our clients and our agency services team provide. There are several steps that each product request needs to go through before it can be accepted into our product roadmap and planned for production — from analyzing their value for our clients, to their impact on the platform, to their possible implementation plans, to their costs for development, to figuring out the plan for their QA, to training and documentation. (The list goes on!) As you might imagine, the result of that process typically results in high-value features getting prioritized while low-value features are deprioritized or requested to be handled by our agency services team using our existing tools.
This is important to know in case you, as a client, need a new product feature. Our evaluation process for this type of work requires much more time and consideration than any work at the agency services level. And, depending on the aforementioned factors, after processing your request, our team will let you know if the feature request can be addressed at the platform level, what the associated costs of doing so would be, and when the product release (calendar month) would be deployed.
By contrast, our agency services team works on a different schedule. Their releases are much more flexible depending on an individual client’s needs, and QA is much simpler since it doesn’t require testing in multiple environments. So, for example, while the platform team releases new features once a month, the agency services team can deliver releases on a daily basis.
With all of that being said, every time we receive a feature request, we'll always be very clear if the request requires a platform update or if our agency services team can deliver it using the tools that we already have available (which is 90% of the cases we encounter).
Hopefully this helps you understand how we work with our clients and partners, and we're always here to answer questions if you have any.
Happy experience building!
