Prolific Interactive Uses Instabug to Foster Closer Relationships With Partners

Prolific Interactive is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in mobile strategy, design, and development. Since 2009, Prolific has been building mobile apps for companies like Saks Fifth Avenue, Old Navy, Sephora, Jet, and more.

“We do product development, whether its a V1 app or whether it’s redoing an existing app or somewhere in between. We don’t want to just build it, we want to make sure it gives you a return on investment,” Joe told us. At any given time, the agency has eight to 12 production teams working on different projects.

Objective

One thing that sets Prolific Interactive apart is their approach to working with “partners” — how they see their clients. They have a close relationship with their partners throughout the lifecycle of their projects, and they have them involved every step of the way as soon as possible.

“We want to get the app in our partners’ hands right away so that they can see it grow as we’re building it,” Joe explained. “We want to keep everyone in the loop in terms of the development process so we don’t have any unexpected surprises at the end of the project.”

Challenge

Prolific Interactive spends about six months developing a V1 app. At the start of a project, there are a lot of unknowns, and in the end, there’s a lot of testing.

“Having a fast feedback loop and getting feedback early and often is important to iterating quickly,” Joe noted. “That includes both getting feedback from your stakeholders but also getting feedback from users.”

Prolific Interactive highly values feedback for product development, but their process for doing so was slow, as it involved e-mails, and incomplete, since they weren’t getting all the information and data they needed from the users reporting the feedback.

Solution

“ We weren’t looking for a solution, but as soon as we saw Instabug, we were like, ‘Oh yeah! That’ll make our lives so much easier.’ So it was a problem we didn’t realize we had. ”

After discovering Instabug, Prolific Interactive now uses Instabug to help develop every app that they make. “It’s in all of our development builds and everybody here is using it,” Joe told us.

Every Instabug report gets forwarded to that particular project’s backlog on Pivotal Tracker, where the PM for that app triages all of the reports.

“ Instabug is one of the SDKs that we install from the get-go. What we mainly use it for is the feedback loop feature — being able to have an easy way for any person on the team or any stakeholder, anybody that’s testing it, to easily report bugs, feedback, whatever they want to do, and draw on the screen and send a note. ”

Instabug has helped Prolific Interactive drastically with their development builds because it's so easy to provide the team with feedback.

“Using Instabug encourages more people to give us more feedback. We’re getting more feedback than we would normally get.”

Instabug has also helped Prolific Interactive triage and fix issues faster. With all the information and data that the SDK provides, the production teams can now actually see, get to, and reproduce problems more quickly, Joe noted, which ultimately helps Prolific Interactive build better apps.