Squadra - Web And Slack App

Encouragement tool for employees and employers, keeping in touch and moving forward in a more connected way.

Squadra is a team productivity app for Slack and the web, built to give remote teams working from home during COVID-19 a way to stay motivated and connected.

Squadra app screen prompting a user to capture a moment of recognition for a squadmate

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Squadra is a team productivity application built for Slack and the web. Due to a sudden uptick in work-from-home during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a dire need to build a team motivational app for remote workers. And that’s how Squadra came into being.

It incorporated team reciprocity, giving feedback on different projects, keeping tabs on work, and giving positive and constructive feedback on any task. Today, working from home is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for millions of super capable workers worldwide.

SQUADRA WEB APP THROUGH NUMBERS

50+
Startups Onboarded
200K+
Investment Raised
10+
Skills Covered

What Squadra Wanted:

The main goal of squadra was to create a platform that would connect and encourage people who were working from home or different locations. They wanted features in the platform that encouraged each individual and gave them insight into their work.

In covid-19 mostly everyone was working from home and it had created a monotonous routine for everyone and therefore Squadra wanted to provide a product that would create an upbeat environment when interacting with one another and lifting their spirits when they feel alone and down.

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE WEB APPLICATION

Wireframing, Rapid Prototyping and User Feedback Collection
High-fidelity mockups in Figma
Developing the web application
Instrumenting the web application to collect customer data
Incorporating a data-driven product development process

Problem Statement:

Initially Squadra was launched as a web application, but did not provide a seamless experience for users. The platform was designed for teams working remotely and its aim was to uplift morale of colleagues while working. To ensure team members remain connected, we wanted to get rid of signing up using website. Since Slack was the primary method of communication, the best way was to built the Squadra Slack app.

Collage of Squadra screens: a Slack activity feed, the "Find your spark" landing screen, and a team mastery-zones dashboard

Our Solution

Stack

Mean Stack for web app
Server used for backend nginx
Front-end Block Kit - Slack API
Heroku deployment, management, and scaling of the app.
For App Instrumentation we used Segment, Amplitude, Customer.io, FullStory,

Services

Data-driven product development:

We followed a data-driven product development strategy from the beginning, by gathering user feedback and incorporating it in our product during every development sprint. Initially, the product was a web application. Before launching the app, we researched user experience and asked a couple of companies to test the product with their employees.

We defined a Product Data Stack For Data instrumentation to analyze user experience and improve the product.

Segment:

It is a Customer data platform that helped us pipeline user data.

Segment collects events from your web & mobile apps and provides a complete data toolkit to every team in your company.

‍We used Segment to collect data from users visiting our website and their interaction with the website. To monitor the data on our website, we used Fullstory, Customer.io, and Amplitude, which were collected on Segment.

Fullstory:

We used Fullstory to analyze the user experience from the moment a user logs on to our website. With the help of Fullstory, we wanted to identify the root problems and optimize the journey.

Customer.io:

To keep our users engaged, we used Customer.io for personalized data-driven emails.

Amplitude:

Amplitude played a vital part in analyzing the product performance. With its help, we checked if the customers are interacting with the product's features in the way we designed and if the user is getting the most out of the product.
Know and predict which combination of features and customer actions in the product (we're talking billions of them) translate to business outcomes—revenue, loyalty and lifetime value.

Obstacles

Learning curve for the development.
User-data instrumentation.
Designing a good user experience and flow.
No budget for large-scale marketing to get the app to a broader audience.
Restricted timeline.

After analyzing the data from user research with the help of the data layer, we were able to pinpoint the root problem. Squadra Slack app provided a seamless experience without having to log on the website.

With Slack, team members just had to log on to the app.

We added new features, development paths, and skills. For example, Squadra started sending team members messages and motivational quotes based on their skills.

The key to a data-driven app is that the data defines the path of the app. Therefore it turned from a motivational app to a learning app.

Key Points

Data-driven outcomes, the founding team learned a lot from the data and diligently followed.
A seamless transition to Slack.
Becoming a defacto app for an average Slack user.

Key Outcomes

The brilliant software engineers at Deltacron delivered a brand new app for Slack in a short time, and released it during the second wave of the pandemic.
The ability to create a sense of work at the office in a remote environment was challenging. That's where the Moments feature came in. Colleagues can encourage each other and give feedback in real-time on projects they are working on. Squadra witnessed a surge in its adoption rate by several startups, looking to keep their team’s morale high.

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