Situational Summary
Printfection is a swag management platform located out of Denver, CO. Founded in 2004, they simplify the buying, managing, and distribution of swag and branded merchandise for their Clients: companies like Zendesk, Hubspot, and Hubspot.
Printfection makes it easy for these companies to create unique, company-branded swag and distribute it globally. This can be for a company’s internal employees (growing business for them, given an increasingly distributed work environment) or their customers. Competitors include Swagup and Sendoso.
There are around thirty people working at Printfection presently, with no one involved in engineering. Their current technology was written by their Co-Founder, Kevin Materi, and has been in production for over 20 years. Given their demanding clientele, Printfection realizes they need to improve their technology, which must be done by a dedicated team.
The long-term objective is to rewrite their entire application suite, including their primary customer-facing application, recipient pages, fulfillment portal, and their internal account management application. This will include a significant design/UX overhaul of most pages. It will need to be responsive for a set of (to be established) mobile device breakpoints; they anticipate native app development in the future.
They will consider the first 2-3 months as a “POC project” when they can establish the protocols and processes of their new team. As far as engineering, they will focus on refactoring (with some enhancement) their Fulfillment application. They will redirect user sessions to the refactored pages as they are completed. The scope of this POC project is complete when all of the Fulfillment application pages have been refactored, deployed, and verified/accepted by end-users. The communication protocols and processes developed during the POC will inform future development for the remaining applications and the viability of their emerging engineering team.
That team will be led by a Head of Engineering, who has yet to be hired. That person will then hire two backend developers to be located, ideally, in Denver. They would like to engage a remote Partner to address their Front End, and QA needs: that frontend would be written in React. They have come to Accelerance to help with this initiative.
The resources needed from the remote Partner will be as follows:
- (1) Senior/lead frontend engineer
- (1) Mid-to-senior frontend engineer
- (1) QA engineer (need to discuss) (both automated and manual)
- (1) TBD UI Designer (may or may not be outsourced)
Printfection’s current technology is written in PHP (backend) and Smarty (frontend). They would like to move to React for the frontend, with APIs connecting to the backend. The APIs will be developed by their in-house team as frontend work dictates; they envision heavy API integration. While they ideally would hire a UX Designer locally, they could outsource this if the proper leadership can be demonstrated by a remote group.
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