Hire Us
lean software development

Railsware History

Today Railsware is a remote-friendly company with two offices in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Krakow, Poland. We are a team of 120+ remarkable professionals spread over 10+ countries, who are committed to crafting remarkable products.

A big dream and people who share the same values led us to what Railsware is now – the team with outstanding product expertise acknowledged by clients and millions of users. We grew into a Product Studio that successfully combines two business directions: product development and consultancy. These directions are integrally connected and complement each other. Due to well-functioning product management, engineering, design processes, and polished approaches, we turn ideas into growing products. 

lean software development

How it all began

The Railsware roots go back to the year 2007 when it was established by a team of four tech-savvy enthusiasts. One of them later became CEO and plays this role nowadays. That was a long winding road full of experiments and insightful learnings. We worked hard to gain our expertise in business processes and product management. All while continuing to polish our software development approaches. Our first profitable project shaped the first product team inside Railsware. That also was a time when our coding culture and delivery approaches evolved.

I had a dream – to create a place where happy talented people work in unison, craft quality products and do things that matter.

Yaroslav Lazor on Railsware

Yaroslav Lazor

CEO at Railsware

 

Product studio model

Our team always wanted to be a part of the product world involved in the whole creation process, not just coding. We practiced different business models and even tried cofounding a few products in the early days. That was a valuable experience, which exposed our business management gaps. The need for new knowledge was evident, and we decided to gain it through learning from successful product companies based in Silicon Valley. We analyzed their cases and approaches in order to apply them to our business. In 2012 we met the Pivotal Labs team, and it was a real game-changing experience for us. That knowledge-sharing trip arouse our consciousness and took the Railsware business to a new quality level. We learned about a powerful product discovery tool – Inception, pair programming approach, and many other great things, which later boosted the quality of our business processes and product development cycle. 

Powered by the team and data-driven approaches, we developed our own company model, which allows transforming our knowledge and experience into solutions. 

Whether we’re working on a client’s product or our own, we use the same approaches and stay true to the lean methodology. This way, we invest in our craft and then apply it to building better products. It forms a continuous improvement cycle and shapes the Product Studio as a platform for the repeatable creation and growth of successful products.

Our products 

Experimenting with internal tools laid the foundation for our paid products – Mailtrap, Smart Checklist for Jira, and Coupler.io. Today, they are used by millions of people around the globe and acknowledged by world-class teams like Atlassian, Adobe, GitHub, Yelp, and Pivotal.

In 2011 while working on a project with our client, we accidentally sent out 200k test emails to the real customers. That was painful, but a fateful mistake. We created a solution to never make such mistakes again, without having a goal to earn money on that. The internal tool we crafted appeared to be very helpful, so later we decided to share it with the community. The demand for this product grew and motivated us to turn it into a profitable business. This is how the journey of the Mailtrap began and started our transformation into a Product Studio. 

In 2017 the Railsware team created a tool for a company-wide transition from Trello to Jira. It was a task organizer built-in in JIRA application for internal use only. As there was no checklist plugin that has an API on the market, we decided to build one. The same story we had with our first product Mailtrap repeated. We shared our solution with the world and it turned to be profitable. Today this add-on is Atlassian Gold Marketplace Partner and one of the Top 3 Checklist add-ons on the Atlassian marketplace.

Railsware is a data-driven company. That’s why documenting, storing, and keeping everything in perfect order is something that we always care about. Our team has done a lot of work importing data into Google Spreadsheets from different data sources, which later resulted in creating a Google Sheets Importer add-on – Coupler.io – our third product that was released in 2020. Later Coupler.io has evolved into a fully-fledged data integration solution. 

Culture we build

To leverage Railsware business we reinvest profit in our own products and team development. 

From the early days, we made development culture the core of our business. It paid off big time, both with the quality of our projects and Railswarians, who tend to stay in the company for 5+ years. T-Shape personality approach unlocks our professional potential in different areas. Through the collaborative way of work, we constantly share our knowledge, learn from each other and master our craft every day. Flexibility and trust are at the core of everything we do.

There is a difference between, “I think” and “I know”. You can build a team only with “I know”. But you can get to “I know” only going through successful experiments and mistakes.

Yaroslav Lazor on Railsware

Yaroslav Lazor

CEO at Railsware

 

Our culture has developed over the long course of Railsware evolution. Now our company stands for a strong belief in the end value of what we do along with continuous learning and improvement.

We strive to influence the way companies are managed through the proven approaches and the products we build. Our goal is to expand Railsware formula to the industry, leveraging company reputation and market visibility.