Overview

Athennian is a Calgary-based legal entity and corporate secretary management cloud platform company founded in 2016. They offer elegant data management and document automation for compliance, ownership, governance, eSign, Office365 and more for in-house legal teams and law firms around the world.

Challenge

In order to grow their existing product in the legal entity space and to meet the demands of existing software integration, Athennian needed:

• An integration to their existing codebase to allow iManage (legal document management software used by several clients) files to be accessed by users of Athennian's product in a unified manner.
• Selecting a project that was well contained; didn’t interact with areas of the code base and/or infrastructure that was frequently updated and could be easily feature flagged.
• All while keeping their existing product development team focused on their current roadmap with minimal disruption and team members being shuffled around.

Solution

Athennian chose Thin Air Labs to support the iManage integration development as they knew they wanted to keep their existing team moving forward on their main offering, and wanted to temporarily augment their team with skilled developers who could execute independently to provide high-quality results.

Discovery: Working with a team member who had done a similar integration, the Thin Air Labs developers studied the existing codebase and structure to maintain cohesiveness and readability. In orde to minimize the risk of misunderstanding iManage documentation, the Thin Air team engaged with iManage directly to ensure a crisp understanding, which also resulted in an improvement in the publicly available iManage documentation.

Design and Development: It was crucial to be aligned before development, and while the Thin Air Labs team and Athennian team worked closely together, with daily touch points and pair programming sessions, it was important to work towards the same goal. Thin Air Labs developers quickly produced a swimlane diagram to illustrate the intended flow, and from this, the team was able to divide and conquer the work. By showing work in progress and demonstrations to the wider organization, the intent and progress of the iManage integration project were communicated in a way that kept everyone informed. Execution was done using Athennian's ceremonies and processes and with Thin Air Labs' extra muscle.

Quality Assurance: When it came time for the QA step, the Thin Air Labs team treated this piece of work with pride. Working with the Athennian product manager and QA members, they triaged and delivered fixesto wrap up the project in a way that did not incur additional work for the rest of the team.

Outcomes

As the iManage integration engagement was winding down, the Thin Air Labs team was requested to work on an extra sprint for a second integration with the same goals of increasing the Athennian product offering while keeping the fierce focus of the in-house team. We delivered another product increment swiftly within two weeks, overcoming complexities and saving the context switching again.

“The Product Traction Team has been invaluable in creating a strong foundation for Product functions within the organization. They have a wealth of experience that allows them to actively contribute to many different conversations. They took the time to understand our business and share their experiences to help us make the best possible decisions.They feel like an extension of our team and are always ready to dig in deep.” - Jordan Rindahl, Director of Product

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