Silver Bow Technology Group
2025-04-25
Silver Bow Technology Group's CRM project came together out of a passion for continuous improvement of their tools and processes. Their aim was to replace an outdated, custom tool that their clients relied upon for organizing their sales efforts. To do this, Sam Heuck Web Development led a software team to design and develop a new, fully custom CRM.
The Process:
In order to be as efficient as possible with the company's limited resources, an agile development process was used. This allowed a small team to produce working software quickly, as well as iterate quickly to develop features with maximum value and impact for the people relying on the software every day.
Silver Bow had a UI design fully developed when the team started work. This enabled the software team to focus on building quality into the software product from the beginning, because many key design and aesthetic choices had already been settled.
What they didn't have was an established practice of building software with agility, or continuously delivering secure, performant, quality code with a predictable cadence.
Goals:
- Establish a professional and transparent software development process
- Replace an outdated, yet critical software component for the business
- Identify and enhance the most impactful features from the original CRM product
- Enable existing users to spend less time juggling data, and more time developing their businesses
- Close security and performance gaps to better enable a smooth transition to a new software product
The approach:
The first step was to gain a thorough understanding of the existing product and how it was used. Software product transitions often fail because key features are removed or diminished, making existing users less willing to adopt the new tools. In order to avoid harming future adoption potential, we worked together to identify the most important aspects of the existing software that users relied on every day. Through a series of meetings, the team broke down the the software into its key parts and made critical decisions based on the intrinsic value of each part of the application. This allowed our team to effectively prioritize the highest value features.
Once the team had a strong understanding of what mattered to users, we dove straight into a formal, lightweight process of agile development. The team, made up of a dedicated product owner, a subject matter expert, and two software engineers, collaborated regularly to ensure the business aspects, user-experience aspects, as well as the technical aspects of the product were well cared for.
Development:
The engineering team started by evaluating several options for an effective technology stack given their available skills and experience. This was key, because a team that doesn't like their tools will struggle to produce good results.
The chosen stack enabled the team to move quickly with minimal risk of accumulating technical debt. NodeJS paired with a SQL-based RDBMS on the backend, combined with a single-page React application on the frontend, made for a modern approach without being too cutting-edge. This stack was chosen in order to balance implementation risks against bleeding-edge technology risks.
Active development was managed directly, Kanban style, by the team itself, including the all-important role of product owner. The team worked together to write useful requirements in the form of user stories, implement key features, and identify opportunities for improving each and every work cycle.
The development team used modern continuous delivery practices to build and deliver working code to the cloud every sprint. Automation specifically for producing their software product enabled the team to focus on the users and produce quality features.
Results:
Over the course of a few months, Silver Bow established a development process that produced a solid foundational architecture for their future product line. Together, we improved the security and performance of their existing product, while at the same time preparing for the next iteration of their next product.