They built a platform to measure how well companies support women employees by using anonymized crowd-sourced feedback.  

InHerSight reached out to thoughtbot after receiving additional funding in 2019. The founders wanted to expand the user experience for their audience by providing a companion mobile experience.  The goal of the new mobile application was to make their career services and community more accessible to women and increase longer-term engagement with their users.

In 2019, InHerSight wanted to explore ways to increase community engagement beyond the job search phase and build longer-term relationships with their growing user-base.  They had a strong vision for an engaging mobile app, but their engineering team did not have the requisite experience to achieve all of their goals.  It was critical for them to find the right technology partner to help them achieve their goal and teach them how to improve their mobile skills along the way.

They looked at several possible solutions but decided on thoughtbot. Why thoughtbot? First, because of our high-quality product design and development. Second, because thoughtbot offered full-time integration with their team. Third, because they had become familiar with some of the local thoughtbot team members.

thoughtbot facilitated a series of design thinking exercises, explored some new concepts, and collaborated with the IHS team to build out a clickable prototype that was tested with real users at the end of the week. The results from the PDS helped clarify core features, defined the initial roadmap for their mobile MVP, and initiated a strong collaborative relationship between thoughtbot and IHS.

Immediately after the design sprint, thoughtbot collaborated with the IHS team to help make critical architecture infrastructure decisions for the project. We chose React Native, a cross-platform framework, for the mobile application build. Throughout the project, thoughtbot consulted with the IHS team and continuously updated an architecture decision document to ensure knowledge could be passed on to other team members within their organization.

In addition to leading strategic architecture decisions, thoughtbot built the front-end React Native portion of the mobile app working side by side with IHS’s design and backend team.  thoughtbot participated in daily stand ups, provided guidance around process improvements, and facilitated weekly retrospectives to ensure that team expectations were being met.

During the development stage of the project, thoughtbot created lessons and tutorials for the IHS development team and walked them through the codebase to ensure that the team would be able to gain the necessary skills in React Native development.  At the end of the project, the IHS team was able to manage the mobile application’s pull requests and ongoing production support successfully on their own.

• Reduce the time to market by 50%
• Launch a high-quality mobile application that was well received by their end-users
• Build their internal team’s enthusiasm and confidence to successfully maintain and continue ongoing React Native development
• Provide professional development for their internal team’s knowledge and skillsets around React Native and mobile best practices
• Build a strategic architectural roadmap for easy reference, transition, and long-term stability for their future.