There's a saying that "the shoemaker's children always go barefoot." That's the relationship we had with our own website.

Now, with 930+ current team members, offices in 6 countries, 209+ ongoing projects, and 7 years of average client lifespan for a company founded over 7 years ago, it was time to make our own shoes.

How did we do it? Let us take you through the journey we took to build the new Mindera website:

1. Involving hundreds of people.
2. Partnering with an external agency.
3. Designing and developing at the same time.
4. Overcoming some frustration with our engineering mindset.
5. Learning from the mistakes and exceeding delivery expectations.
   

Here's where our story truly begins.

Involving hundreds of people

2021 was when we started the challenge of revamping our website. At Mindera, we make decisions by involving the people who are affected by their outcomes. This meant the first challenge was to open doors to our team’s thoughts.

But how could we bring together hundreds of people? Focus groups, internal surveys and one-on-one sessions came to the rescue. This allowed us to identify the key features we needed to develop by understanding how our Minders perceived Mindera — what they liked and disliked about our website, along with why and how they use it.

We had the strategy and core features, now we needed to make it visible in a way that was website compatible.

Partnering with an external agency

You may be asking yourself "why did we collaborate with an external agency when we have in-house UX/UI design talent?" The answer is simple: our designers would love to have their hands on something dear to everyone's hearts but they're focused on client work. It would take longer to deliver what we needed.

So our UX/UI designers worked on some screens, mood boards, and created other different resources to provide guidance on where we would like to go.

We started by shortlisting some design agencies, based on what matters most to us: people.

We asked for referrals and had calls with six agencies. Mindera is a global company, so we made this process worldwide and distributed a request for proposal (RFP) to four of the agencies, based in Portugal, India, and the United States.

We offer our thanks to all of them for taking the time to meet us and putting together an amazing proposal that made it harder to make a decision.

After some discussions, we decided to partner with Miew — a studio that “transforms business goals into great digital products.”

To make sure our partner had everything required to deliver what we needed, we had an in-house product owner and two UX/UI designers overseeing and supporting Miew's work.

Miew created and shared a Figma project with the Mindera team, and created a Slack workspace where we could quickly communicate. For each piece of work delivered, our UX/UI designers were then able to iterate and adapt to the change requirements received from the business side.

Designing and developing at the same time

Being a software development house, our core team is full of talented software engineers. They deliver amazing work for our partners but it means their availability for working on our own projects is often as deep as a puddle.

We were lucky with the timing. Some people were transitioning projects and others had workloads that allowed them to manage their time between client delivery and Mindera website tasks. It makes us extremely proud because working as a team with our clients led us to discuss this with them and agree on it, so we continued to deliver the work expected by them while also taking care of our business.

After discussing and deciding on the tech stack (Node.js, React, Strapi, Netlify and Google Cloud Platform), we started the development process before we completely finished the design work — we're an agile company, what can we say? This allowed us to build solutions based on the views and expertise of different people when we had to make a decision.

Miew was always building on top of our UX/UI Designers' insights. When we had to start a new website section or iterate on previous work, we listened to designers, developers, and product people, and moved forward as a team with the approach we were all comfortable delivering.

Overcoming some frustration with our engineering mindset

We've given you quite a warm story of our website journey. But let's be honest, it wasn't always rainbows and butterflies. Involving hundreds of people means having the ability to reach outcomes when there are different opinions and diverse tastes to contend with, especially regarding the look and feel of the website.

Our team has always been very attached to the little yellow Minder and our motto ‘We use technology to build products we are proud of, with people we love’. Our seven years of heritage and unique culture needed to be kept, but we also needed to showcase our expertise and clarify what we do.

Miew came up with some suggestions for the colour palette and for the new motto. The new colourful palette (inspired by children’s building blocks) and the doodles (representing the handwriting and the human way of drawing things) were incredible ways to represent our playful personality.

However, we felt that the bold motto they suggested didn’t represent Mindera in the best way we could. Our soul deserved a strong concept. We knew it should come from inside, from the hearts of the people that live Mindera on a daily basis. So we took their proposal and kicked off internal discussions on the concept we wanted to portray.

Truth to be told, all the back and forth that followed was frustrating. We were our own client, which makes things even harder. We wanted to do everything and make all the great ideas work. All the requirements were also a priority — dear partners, we hear you!

But as we say in Portuguese, "Não se pode agradar a Gregos e Troianos" — One cannot please Greeks and Trojans. And we had to move forward. What did we do? What we know best, we followed our software engineering mindset and embraced iteration as part of the learning and improvement process.

Although it took some time, because everyone wanted to participate and decide, we ended up continuing to believe that trusting people was the best way to go.

We gave ownership and accountability to the people who were responsible for the website development. In the end, we were able to develop more than what we were expecting in the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) version.

We've developed a website founded on a marketing strategy that's carefully designed by and for our world. We've created a product that results from our self-organised ways of working. We’ve built an online home that showcases our industry expertise, how much we care for each other and the work we do, and our friendly and caring culture — ‘We craft software with people we love.’

Learning from the mistakes and exceeding delivery expectations

Looking back, could we have done things differently? You bet we could! And having this understanding means we've learned something from building our website.

But there is one thing I wouldn't change for anything in the entire world: the group of people who were involved in this project. They represent Mindera — committed people who always have your back. Colleagues who become friends. Exceptional human beings.

2022, one year and something later, Mindera is over 7 years old, has 950+ current team members, offices in 6 countries, 209+ ongoing projects, and a 7-years average client lifespan. And we have a shiny new website that we love.

We’re proud to say that the shoemaker's children now have functional and beautiful shoes to achieve their dreams.

Welcome to our brand new #MinderaWorld website: www.mindera.com