Case Study: From OfficeTogether to Envoy
Starting with OfficeTogether
“I need a functioning product demo in four weeks. Can you do it?”
When Amy Yin asked Ian Panchèvre this question in early September of 2020, it may have sounded like a crazy request. Amy had an opportunity to seize — but she needed a software partner to do so.
Eventually, Amy’s startup, OfficeTogether, would provide scheduling and reservation software for hybrid-remote teams. Tracking office attendance, managing capacity, and coordinating events were some of the challenges that workplaces confronted as they transitioned to a hybrid-remote office culture. Amy had spotted an opportunity, but had not yet begun to build her software offering.
At the end of month, Amy would be meeting with the CTO of a large enterprise. She knew that if she could secure a commitment from a large client, she’d be able to raise a round of funding. However, the CTO wanted to see a product demo. And Amy had not much to show beyond some preliminary wireframes. That’s when she called Ian.
Amy and Ian knew each other through the Stanford GSB community — both were admitted to Stanford’s MBA program while still in their senior year of college, Amy at Harvard and Ian at Yale.
Ian was the founder of Amplified Software, a professional software development agency with teams in Romania and Nicaragua. Whereas most software teams would push back against a tight deadline, Amplified welcomed the challenge.
Ian quickly mobilized a team at Amplified. After a month of intense collaboration with Amy, a functional MVP went online and OfficeTogether was born. Amy impressed the CTO and raised a round of funding, and then another. She was off and running.
(Later on, Amplified and OfficeTogether became co-winners of an award given by Hasura, for fastest go-to-market for a new app.)
Over the next two years, OfficeTogether worked closely with Amplified to build a sophisticated web application. As Amy recruited engineers to OfficeTogether’s internal team, Amplified stayed engaged. In fact, Amplified helped to onboard and train the in-house engineers while also developing new features. Throughout the partnership, Amplified made up about half of OfficeTogether’s engineering team.
Transition to Envoy
In mid-2022, Ian received another call from Amy, with great news: OfficeTogether was being acquired by Envoy, a unicorn startup and a market-leading brand for its workplace tech platform. Envoy had thousands of customers in the United States, Canada, Europe, South America, and India, plus 10 times as many employees as OfficeTogether.
More good news: Amplified had done such an incredible job with OfficeTogether that Envoy wanted the Amplified engagement to carry over post-acquisition. Envoy would become Amplified’s first “unicorn” startup client, offering Amplified the opportunity to plug into a large and mature engineering organization. However, there was another catch: Envoy used a completely different technology stack than OfficeTogether. Whereas OfficeTogether used React and Node.js, Envoy used Kotlin, Python, and EmberJS.
No problem. Once again, the Amplifiers jumped right in, learning Envoy’s processes, environments, and tech stack within a few short weeks.
Projects at Envoy
When Amplified first teamed up with Envoy, the Amplifiers were tasked with a complex engineering challenge: completely rewrite and replace the backend infrastructure of an existing app — Rooms — without disrupting the user experience (which would force the users to reinstall and update their app). Envoy’s technical environment used numerous interconnected apps and tools written in a variety of programming languages, maintained by multiple teams. This was a delicate project that required perfect execution, which in turn necessitated meticulous planning and collaboration.
Amplified’s successful rewrite ensured a seamless customer migration to the new version of Rooms. Their commitment to excellence is evident in the results of their efforts. Rooms is a part of the Envoy platform that allows organizations to manage and book shared spaces. As part of the migration effort, Amplified took special care to ensure that all logging data solutions and analytics were in place to manage any unexpected issues.
“This migration has been attempted twice over 2 years prior to the acquisition,” an engineering manager at Envoy explains, “but the Amplified + OfficeTogether team was able to turn it around and successfully deliver it within 6 months.”
Separate from the backend work, Amplified delivered major contributions to the frontend. Namely, Envoy’s customers were asking for a better tablet experience, and it was Amplified that was tasked to improve its UX and functionality. Amplified implemented features that allowed users to create custom meetings, book rooms in advance, see attendees and room amenities, and more.
Rooms is currently being used by hundreds of Envoy’s enterprise customers, who are now enjoying the latest improvements and features.
Conclusion
Envoy was the largest startup that Amplified had ever partnered with, which meant adapting to the processes and culture of a large engineering organization. Amplified’s projects had to be approved by several stakeholders, and once the Amplifiers knew what their tasks were, they had to meet strict deadlines. Many teams in the organization depended on Amplified’s timely delivery.
Despite the challenges of working with a demanding engineering organization, Amplified was able to go above and beyond to deliver top-notch solutions for Envoy’s customers.
“I cannot recommend a contracting firm more,” says Willy Xiao, Engineering Manager at Envoy. “Over the course of 2 years, I worked with Amplified across the lifecycle of multiple projects. This team exceeded my expectations for a contracting firm on three fronts:
“First, the team was incredibly self-sufficient. With high-level directives and goals, the team is able to manage projects with aggressive timelines, make reasonable product decisions while bringing in PMs and EMs when necessary, and in all of triaging, prioritizing, and squashing bugs that emerged throughout the lifecycle of the product. The project managers can communicate professionally, clearly, and responsibly with customers directly when needed and the engineers exercise good judgment on when to be bold and when to ask for clarification and advice from tech leads at OfficeTogether and Envoy.
“Second, the team is able to make long-term technical decisions. Rather than simply spinning up quick prototypes or ‘hacky’ code which incurs a lot of tech-debt, this team understands how to think about writing maintainable, scalable, and long-living code. This team worked on some of the most core parts of OfficeTogether and Envoy and regularly presented, discussed, and executed on system designs driven by Amplified engineers.
“Third, this team is adaptable: it learns and grows to the system that’s needed. After the Envoy acquisition, the Amplified team quickly picked up Kotlin, Kafka, Ember instead of React, and Kubernetes. This team is excited to learn and grow along with any client and I’m impressed not by their knowledge of any individual system but by their dedication and excitement to adapt to any new system that comes their way. Even beyond code, this team picked up production processes like daily deployments, happy-path testing, feature-flags, and system design RFCs.
“I would jump at the opportunity to work with this team again in the future and at its core deeply trust the team to be aligned with the long-term interests of the client and deliver high-quality software in a speedy timeframe.”
Beyond learning a new technology stack, the Amplifiers developed new managerial skills. “I was exposed, for the first time, to the organization and management of a large-scale microservice project,” says one of the Amplifiers, Sebastian. “The high-stakes environment of working on multiple microservices for a widely used product sharpened my attention to detail and heightened my awareness of potential bugs and edge cases,” shares Alex, another engineer on the team.
