Next Online Event: How to Build a Digital Product for Pandemic Response

Kelly Gebo

You might have heard of PathCheck, an organization founded out of MIT that saw rapid growth this year. They quickly cultivated both a community of technologists and a robust open-source library. We are proud to list them as a client, and we’ve been working with their team in creating contact tracing apps to support containing the pandemic while preserving the privacy of individuals. It’s been quite the experience!

Their vision is to build a new generation of digital solutions for public health which in the past 6 months included the creation of multiple contact tracing apps for communities across the world. Our product team was tasked with getting something to market quickly without compromising quality. It was imperative that the solution would be able to scale to serve millions of users around the world, and deliver at a high quality as a part of the first launch.

thoughtbot & PathCheck are both big believers in sharing what we’ve learned, and have found a lot of fulfillment in maintaining open source resources. The event will help us open up a conversation, and hopefully equip other groups with the knowledge to be successful.

We hope sharing more of the inner workings and facilitating a space for conversation will equip other groups to be successful. Once COVID-19 is behind us, we are hopeful that our work done to date and the larger effort to share will help us uncover a wide range of other areas in which we can support our communities after the pandemic is contained.

This fireside chat will be between:

  • Sam Zimmerman, CTO, PathCheck
  • John Schoeman, Development Team Lead, thoughtbot

Event Details:

This workshop will include:

  • Lessons Learned through rapid, high-stake product design, development & launch
  • How to manage a growing product team, highly visible launches and open-source library in parallel
  • Navigating sensitivity and privacy concerns in contract tracing apps
  • The good and bad of going with React Native for this use case
  • Live Q&A with you the audience

This workshop is ideal for:

  • Engineers, designers and other product people who are interested in contributing to this project.
  • Product teams working on similar projects
  • Organizations considering launching some sort of “return-to-the-office” product
  • Individuals interested in innovations around fighting COVID and helping folks return to work/life.

Even if you aren’t able to attend, your registration will get you a recording of the session.