Bringing a product to the market and attracting the first customers are important milestones. Some would say, though, that this is just when the fun begins. Startups, established businesses, and even huge corporations constantly innovate and improve their products. They try to gain a competitive advantage, distinguish themselves from competitors, …

In order to maintain career growth and ensure fair compensation, every engineering team needs an efficient method to evaluate its members. A nicely developed assessment model requires considerable resources in terms of time and professional expertise. However, we believe it is a significant contribution to the team and business development, …

There is some mystique surrounding agile product development. In this article, we aim to strip that away by explaining the key features and benefits of the Agile methodology. Then we compare them against more traditional approaches. To conclude, we explore how Agile helps to deliver complex product development projects. The …

Every company has a vision which explains the impact the product will have on the world. It’s the product strategy that turns the vision into a roadmap.

Creating a software product is a complex procedure consisting of versatile components. In other words, it is not enough to gather a team of experienced developers and tell them what you need. A proper organization of a workflow, as well as a constant tracking of all stages of the agile …

When it comes to Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), two languages stand out from the pack in terms of maturity, community and worldwide use, namely Ruby and Python. And since a large portion of programming languages are used in conjunction with web development, we have to discuss their respective web frameworks: Ruby …

There are lots of great ideas, but ideas don’t always turn into successful software products. Sometimes, the idea itself just wasn’t good enough, and the marketplace didn’t have any use for it. At other times, poor user experience (UX) is the reason for the lack of success. Research suggests that …

There should be a correct balance between authority, responsibility, and accountability. Learn how to strike this balance and potential pitfalls. Find out about the Railsware approach to the authority-responsibility-accountability concept. Why can’t you delegate responsibility? Think back to a situation when your business needed expert help, and you hired a …

IT companies worldwide compete to be the most creative in offering people benefits to win the battle for top talent. The pandemic has played its role in forcing businesses to rethink existing value proposition and adapt them to the new reality – and this affects more than just office-based enterprises. …

The tech world is making peace with the fact that most teams will continue working remotely throughout the entire 2021. This may be a challenge for companies who have a long tenure of running offices. These days, teams are struggling to figure out how to stay productive and united through …

Taking an idea and converting it into a thriving, workable product or service isn’t a simple task. You need to be innovative while still delivering value. Steve Jobs said that it’s people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. But crazy …

Ruby on Rails, frequently referred to as just Rails or RoR, is a popular open-source framework. While it’s not the youngest kid on the block (it turned 16 in 2020), it’s still among the top choices for web application developers. Rails has done more for startups than a whole boatload …

Things and ideas are alive; they come to life and die as humans do. Their lives are stories – some are straightforward and ordinary to the point of being boring, some are full of ups and downs, abrupt twists, and breathtaking moments. If we put aside romanticism and look behind …

Constantly decreasing costs, no waste, minimum throughput time, maximum capacity, unlimited flexibility, and high customer satisfaction. Sounds too good to be true? But that’s what lean is all about. What is “lean”? Being able to progressively create “insanely great” products, as Steve Jobs would put it, and especially at the …

Mailtrap is our product and the very popular email testing tool. Check out how we took it from a free prototype to a product with thousands of paying users.

Learn how to automate importing users’ data from BigQuery to MailerLite via API using Coupler.io, Google Sheets, and Apps Script. This approach will help you save time on collecting users’ data from various sources in a single email audience.

We look at four excellent methods for running a successful product discovery process. We explain each of them and suggest which to use (and when).

It’s far from easy to build a company that breathes growth and development. But we managed to build one, and we’re exploring the key aspects you should be always looking for.

Scrum and Kanban are two of the many successful approaches to building products. We analyze six of their alternatives and list the pros and cons of each.

What does it actually mean to work remotely or in a mixed office mode? How do we manage effective communication and cope with productivity concerns? In this article, we describe our approaches that really work, and Railswarians share their remote experience.