We all know that building a successful mobile application is a tough mission for any Product Manager. However, building a children’s lovable edutainment mobile application seems to be an impossible one. 

About 4 years back, the Jeel platform founding team’s primary mission was to build a world full of entertainment within a safe educational framework for children, no less enjoyable than the content provided in foreign channels.

Clearly, there were multiple questions to answer:

• How are we going to build a lovable children’s user experience product?
• How can we build and rely on software process supports our fast-growing and changing product needs?
• How can we control development and technology costs?
• How to hire and maintain the software and technology talents our business needs?

Various options were there, providing different benefits and risks to take and consider. 

The first option was to build our own in-house software development team by scaling up our technology department, to peer with our huge art production department. And a Second option was to fully outsource our software development needs to a separate specialized company as a fixed scope project, accountable for implementing our requirements. 

The choice was not that simple since every option has pros and cons; we needed to compare & evaluate the value of them both.

At first, building our team seems to be much more controllable. It will boost our ability to manage the cost, oversee the process, and permit our team the flexibility to update the requirements and prioritize.

On the other side, with all the significant benefits, comes the burden on our shoulders. There will be the required talent hiring process, picking the technology leaders, and absorbing the business’s dramatic changes. Without a doubt, that may force us to deviate from our essential focus, being a lovable edutainment platform.

Our second option was to fully outsource our software needs as a fixed scope project, being more attractive. Since it will give us the full flexibility for both our product management and creative team, to act as customers asking and watching the delivery of our changing requirements. That should make us carefree.

We went on the safest path; to outsource this fixed scope project to a specialized software house.

To make a long story short; after a couple of months full of nightmares departing the timeline, the cost, and the requirements changed. We cut off all that and consider another attractive option “MD-Labs Team as a Service”.

MD-Labs TaaS achieved for us the magical recipe. Simply getting the benefits of having our software team, while being able to focus on our core business far away from the normal software development hassle. 

Jeel MD-Labs TaaS team built and acted in a few weeks to redefine our product backlog and user stories professionally. Defining our technology stack as well as establishing our Agile scrum required roles. 

After the setup finished, Jeel TaaS agile team in an iterative agile mood, built our lovable Jeel Mobile application and administration framework. On daily stand-ups and weekly iterations, we have the access to meet the team and the authority to monitor the progress and share our feedback on the work products. 

This TaaS scrum team enabled us to achieve our time-to-market penetration target, in a few months after. Also supporting us in doing multiple internal testing and soft launch. 

After about four years of utilizing Jeel MD-Labs TaaS team, we are proud we have around one million application downloads across the different stores that care about our edutainment lovable content. In addition, our development team and implemented technology stack are both reliable and effective enough to lunch extra features monthly.