# media & entertainment

a powerful relationship marketing platform

backend

Symfony

Microservices

PHP

MongoDB

REST API

design

UX Audit

UX Enhancements

frontend

React

Redux

Draft.js

Webpack

React Beautiful Dnd

HTML5

CSS3

Manual Testing

API testing

Automated UI tests

WebdriverIO

tools

Travis CI

Sentry

Docker

Postman

80k+

businesses in 160 countries served

languages supported

Merixstudio’s team members

100

million emails/sms per day

Sendinblue (now Brevo) is an innovative Saas solution that empowers small and medium-sized businesses to build relationships through marketing campaigns, transactional messaging and marketing automation. Sendinblue was acclaimed 14th Fastest Growing Company in Europe by the Financial Times (2018).

The Client reached out to Merixstudio with a need for qualified support in a rapid scale-up of the startup. The key challenge for Merixstudio was to smoothly and quickly align themselves with the existing product and maintain collaborative work in a culturally-diverse multi-timezone setup.

Merixstudio’s team was responsible for the timely implementation of a clear-cut scope that mainly boiled down to empowering users to automate email marketing by generating custom forms and pages. Taking into consideration the scale and complexity of the whole application as well as a number of inherent dependencies, the team decided to pay a special focus on the testing process and to double QA efforts. Except for unit tests by the dev team, this mainly referred to QA functional testing i.e. writing numerous test cases and performing intensive manual testing, automated functional testing with WebdriverIO, JavaScript, Mocha, Chai as well as functional API testing with Postman.

We have composed a dedicated, self-managed team, including Scrum Master, UX designer, QA specialists, front-end and back-end engineers. The headcount varied between 7 and 10 as the team size was adjusted to the current project needs. The biggest extension concerned QA and UX teams, which resulted from the necessity to audit the client’s design and perform automated UI tests. More detailed information on team fluctuations is presented in the chart below.

One of the major challenges of the project was the effective remote cooperation of teams located in Poland, France and India. To successfully handle the workflow with an almost 5-hour time zone difference, all sides needed to understand the crucial role of communication and fully comply with the jointly agreed terms of cooperation. We achieved tangible results by harnessing the best Agile and Scrum practices, in particular:

organizing our work into 2-week sprints that synchronized planning-related activities, increased our focus and allowed us to update our thinking,
conducting daily meetings with dedicated people from all teams to keep up-to-date with the development process
setting up several channels on Slack to cover different topics for constant communication
keeping the essential information about tasks and processes in JIRA and Confluence
arranging regular reviews to demonstrate the effects of work, update the status of the project and collaborate on the plan ahead

designing emailing automation templates

creating customized HTML email layouts by dragging and dropping various blocks including text blocks, clickable buttons, and images
email scheduling

scheduling emails to be sent at a particular time. Machine learning-powered algorithm suggests a time to achieve the best possible engagement with contacts
performance monitoring

providing real-time statistics about deliverability, open and click-through rates, heat map

marketing automation

optimizing contact management with 8 out-of-the-box automation workflow templates
recipient segmentation

collecting the email addresses and contact information with custom forms, contact segmentation, custom contact fields.