Services
Helping boost your existing team.
It’s a common situation. You're facing a complex project —moving to a new content management system, implementing new functionality, or onboarding a new tool — and you need your development team brought up to speed.
You’re looking for someone who can help build your new implementation, get your team familiar with platform best practices, and gracefully take a step back and support as needed.
At Blend, we call this coaching and co-development. And it's one of the things we do best.
What does a standard coaching engagement look like? It all depends on what you need.
To begin, you’ll work with Blend’s strategy and development teams to understand where we can best fit. We will define the goals of coaching, which could include:
With this strategic coaching roadmap in place, we work toward a common coaching plan. Feature development, co-development, code review, and periodic benchmarks help ensure we're working toward your goals of independence.
In other words, we create a plan that matches your team's skillset and goals for growth. We can take on the heavy lifting and help set you up for support, or we can provide on-the-spot guidance as needed — or, anywhere in between.
Taking on .NET development and feeling stuck? We can be your head coach.
Whether this is your first Optimizely or Umbraco project, an extension of the platform, or onboarding for a new teammate, we can guide you through each step. Our development team will act as the lead developer for the project and will be responsible for understanding technical requirements, ongoing deployments, and building key features.
In the meantime, we carve out time in each sprint to bring your devs up to speed – reviewing code, teaching best practices, and answering any questions. As we progress through the project, we share responsibilities, giving your team more ownership of your code.
We continue to coach through code reviews, peer programming, and focused discussions, all while we track toward project launch.
Some teams already have extensive experience in complex .NET development outside of Optimizely or Umbraco. What these teams need is a co-captain to help them understand how their experience translates to their specific CMS.
For this partnership, our team shares the responsibility of seeing the project through to launch. Blend's developers take the lead in setting up the project while coaching your team through screen share sessions and focused demonstrations – ensuring the project starts off on the right foot following best practices.
This continues until we reach a pre-determined milestone, when it's time to pass the baton. From here on out, your team becomes responsible for the implementation while our team transitions into a guide for peer programming and code reviews.
Web development is tough — we know. Even the most experienced developers run into challenges like tackling a tough CMS upgrade, building custom functionality, or integrating without an API.
This is why we offer help in conditioning and drills. Through peer programming, screen-sharing discussions, and code reviews, Blend will work with your team to help guide you through whatever your project calls for.
We’ve done a lot of great things for a lot of great clients — including co-developiong and coaching existing development teams the ins and outs of their new CMS. Check out more projects similar to this one.