DEV Community: Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO

Why most Laravel projects fail

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 07:40:55 +0000

With my team, we've recently taken over a large Laravel ecosystem from an incumbent partner. Our client came to us to rescue their project because the business team had lost trust in their developers. The developers struggled to upgrade the framework, the QA team were rushing deployment without any confidence, and the velocity of the new feature releases was just grounding to a halt. Everyone on the project was very frustrated and had lost trust in the entire process.

That's not the first time we're seeing this. There seems to be a pattern of how large Laravel complex ecosystems got managed and how they scaled over time.

Today I will share the story of how we came into the process and how we discovered a series of critical failings and more importantly, the five main lessons that you can start applying today on your Laravel project to rebuild trust between your teams, deliver an efficient process and keep your Laravel platform secure and scalable.

Make sure you watch until the end because the fifth and last recommendation will apply to more than your software development project... It's relevant to your life in general!

Let's get to it.

5 reasons why most Laravel projects fail to deliver value

As I was saying, when we took over the source code of this large Laravel application six months ago, we started with a technical code audit and reviewed how the infrastructure was set up on the hosting side. Like any pair of fresh eyes looking at a source code and code base, we identified many areas for improvements, but this was not the real problem... it's not the real issue on why the project was failing.

The outcome of a technical Laravel audit

After reviewing the whole process end to end, we identified that it's not always an issue with the developers themselves. It's usually a team failing, with lots of inefficiencies across the whole process end to end.

1. Align business with technical vision

The first point we identify was starting from the very top where you need to align the business vision with the technical delivery. Every web application starts with a good idea, but it needs a clear vision, both for the product roadmap, but also for the team building the products. There can be lots of external influences disrupting the product roadmap and that's normal. Over time, the complexity just increases, that's fine. However, without a clear vision, you will struggle to prioritise new features. You will rush things without thinking about the longer term. It will lead to misalignment between the business vision and the technical delivery.

To solve the challenge, you need to put a strong product owner in charge. This person needs to lead with a user experience mindset, always putting the end users first.

That person should also be able to enforce governance for managing the technical requirements. If the development team gets involved earlier in the process, they can raise technical risks and make recommendations before key commitments are made. This will help the collaboration and align the business with what is a technically sound solution.

2. Focus on delivery

Once you have a clear vision and understanding of your user needs, you can start looking at how these requirements trickle down from the top to the delivery team of designers and developers. As we've seen earlier, it's very hard for business and tech teams to speak the same language, and this can often lead to conflicting priorities. For example, the sales team might promise a new feature to win an important new customer. But what if the tech team was planning on a major backend upgrade, or what if they need to refactor before this new feature can be built? This is where agile delivery can bring stronger collaboration. It's not a silver bullet, trust me... It doesn't work for all businesses, but we can take a pragmatic approach by making sure you define the process to prioritise the features, by managing the backlog collaboratively with the entire team, by taking the time to plan things properly, by spending enough time narrowing down the requirements... all of that will bring more transparency and efficiency to everyone in the team.

Yes, it might slow you down in the few initial releases, but it will increase the overall quality and the satisfaction of all the stakeholders.

3. Define a Laravel upgrade strategy

Once you have a clear vision and a smooth delivery process, you can start digging deeper into the technology and plan the upgrade strategy of your Laravel framework.

As we know, open source is great. We promote it all the time and feel it's the best solution in many use cases. By going open source, you save on license fees, however, you need to invest some time and budget in refactoring, patching & doing all those upgrades... it is becoming your responsibility.

One of the best things about Laravel is that the core is very stable with predictable, yearly releases. However, external packages might be a challenge and they might not be maintained or upgraded in time.

When a new feature comes in, don't just estimate the time it takes to just make that new feature work in a few lines of code. You need to think about all the dependencies and estimate whether there might be opportunities to refactor the underlying features and existing code to make this new feature work better, more scalable, and better tested... You need to think about all of that.

Once this is part of your process, you just need to enforce software delivery principle best practices: from managing pull requests and enforcing code reviews, to embracing automation and DevOps... All of that will save you time and remove human errors.

4. Securing your Laravel ecosystem

Once you have all of this in place, it's time to secure your Laravel ecosystem. As we all know, it's a growing concern for everyone from the general public, and the regulations are finally catching up. No one is immune to it. The tech is evolving so fast, and hackers always seem to be one step ahead. Look, even if Twitter and Facebook can get hacked with their developers who are paid in the millions, how can it not be a risk for us with just "normal" teams, we're like minions compared to them. You can have the best IT team or have a PhD in cloud security, how can you ensure that there is no weak link? It could just be a moment of distraction from a developer to open a vulnerability, or a junior marketing intern putting the password into the wrong place, it opens a backdoor to the entire system.

To secure your Laravel application, you need to spend time training all your team members and building a culture of security, where concerns and questions are raised in the open during every spring planning, every retrospective, and every code review.

Another tip: forget about ad hoc penetration tests. If you run those once a quarter on every major release, they will get out of date by the moment they're published as we've seen.

What we started doing with our partners is continuous security testing, where we try to break into our clients' systems before the bad actors can get in. This is the only way to outpace genuine cyber threat actors. Reach out if you want to learn more.

5. Continually improving your Laravel application

Finally, like everything in life, you need to embrace continual improvements. Unfortunately, even with unlimited budgets, the best product owners and amazing developers, there will always be room for improvements... No one is perfect, team motivation might fluctuate and it's IT right, something will always go wrong!

You need to embrace changes and learn from sprint retrospectives. You need to listen to each other and communicate all the time. You need to document the process and the key decisions that are being made at all stages. This will also help onboarding new team members who are joining your team

You need to stay open-minded at all times. At the end of the day, you will learn from mistakes, invest time to do things properly and find ways to deliver value to all your stakeholders.

Keeping a happy team around your Laravel ecosystem

If you focus on end users/customers, your stakeholders who are paying the bills and finally your coworkers in UX, Marketing, Dev and QA, if you manage to keep everyone happy and working better together, you will be able to solve most of your challenges. This is how you'll achieve great efficiencies with your Laravel ecosystem.

Those are the five main lessons that we discovered and are applying to all the new projects that we're taking over on the Laravel framework.

But the secret is that it does not only apply to Laravel! The same challenges are faced by most teams working on digital transformation projects, no matter the framework.

That's it for today. If you have any questions about anything Laravel-related or digital transformation in general, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.

As a next step, you can read this article where I share some of the practical tips and an approach to refactoring your Laravel application, so you can make it more efficient.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.

Drupal 10 CMS - The guide to what's coming

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 19:38:00 +0000

The new version of Drupal 10 is coming this December 2022. If you're currently working on Drupal 7 or even Drupal 9, it's time to start planning the updates. Drupal is one of the most enterprise-ready open source content management systems, powering websites like Tesla, Verizon and the Stanford University.

5 major changes coming to Drupal 10

We'll look in this video at the five major changes that this new Drupal 10 version will bring and how you can get ready. It's important that you don't get left behind! As a software engineer or full-stack developer, as you know, you always need to continually improve your digital platform, stay secure, and keep up the performance and accessibility.

This video will hopefully help you stay ahead of the game. Make sure you watch until the end when I'll give you a few tips if you're struggling to convince your boss or marketing manager that they need to invest in the upgrade and avoid running an unsupported and outdated content management system. Let's get to it.

Last year, Dries Buytaert, the founder and lead developer of the Drupal content management system presented a roadmap for Drupal 10 - which was backed by extensive research - and he outlined five strategic goals. Let's go through them one by one.

1. Drupal 10 readiness

As an open source content management, Drupal is using a lot of third-party components from the wider communities, such as Symfony, CKEditor and PHP. Drupal 10 needs to align with the latest version of PHP 8 and Symfony and all those components.

The six-month delay we've seen recently in the release of Drupal 10 is largely down to the need to develop a migration path for the content that was created with the CKEditor plugin from version 4 to 5. This will be a major milestone when this is ready in a few months.

2. Project Browser

This update will bring an easier option to search and install the thousands of third-party modules and add-ons that you can add as an additional feature to your core content management system. At the moment, the developers "just know" the most popular modules and usually have to install them manually... They just know where to look on the main Drupal website.

This new interface will be integrated directly with the admin area and longer term, bring a powerful search engine with categories, and hopefully allow a one-click installation for some of those.

My view is that it's a step in the right direction, but it's not gonna be a magic solution. When you run a large website ecosystem, you will still require technical configuration and a proper release and change management workflow, as well as thorough testing, to make sure that any new module that you install does not break the rest of your website... you just cannot take that risk.

3. Automatic Updates

Drupal's security group is recognized by most of the community as very proactive and efficient when it comes to patching the vulnerabilities to the core framework. However, third-party modules from the community are not their responsibility. Most of those become unmaintained over time and open huge security risks to your website.

The current aim of the automatic update initiative is to apply the Drupal core patches and security only. It's not clear whether that will include security updates or address those modules approved by the Drupal core team. Doing the automatic updates brings a lot of complexity that shouldn't be underestimated, as you have to check after the automatic update to make sure that nothing is broken or that you might need to roll back. Again, a large corporate ecosystem will need a dedicated team to monitor this manually.

4. Easy Out Of The Box

As a content management system, Drupal has a steep learning curve, but it can scale very well to enterprise solutions and deliver global websites better than most other platforms.

We're currently building an academy in my company for training, and even our developers admit that it has a steep learning curve and they struggle to learn it at the beginning when they were junior developers. However, the more they use it, the more complex features they need to build, the more they love it. This easy out-of-the-box initiative aims to smoothen this initial onboarding with a nicer default theme, like Claro for the administrators or Olivero for the administrators. These themes will be more accessible, more performant and easier to use. It will be simpler for developers as well to build custom themes on top of it.

It will bring a lot of SEO benefits as well: the new CKEditor for example will remove the H1 tag - because there should only be one on the page and that will come from the page title in Drupal.

Finally, we'll be able to manage lazy loading for the images directly in the CMS. I think we should all enable that as the default feature everywhere.

5. Decoupled Menu

This final initiative has confused many of my coworkers, but it could have quite a big impact on the new headless trend that is taking the web development community by storm. It will help to provide a more consistent experience for JavaScript developers by reusing existing React components, for example, and the robust Drupal API that we can build on top of other frameworks, without needing a Drupal theme for every website. It started with the navigation element as a proof of concept but will hopefully roll out to contents and maybe forms... we'll see where it goes in future iterations.

Those are the five main changes that we are expecting to come in Drupal 10 with some of them already being available as work in progress or preview in Drupal 9.4 so you can check them out today.

Media library upgrade?

I've not seen many updates about the future upgrade for the media library, where there is some need to clear up the confusion around the media entities, the files, the images, and how it could become more consistent and better work with content moderation. We'll have to see, don't forget to subscribe to follow up for more details when those are released.

How to convince your manager to upgrade to Drupal 10?

Now for the bonus material I promised you - if you're still running on a Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 website, you really need to wake up. Drupal 7 will be end of life in November 2023, just over a year from now. The migration is really painful and you cannot avoid it. If you need your boss to invest into a revamp and the upgrade, there are three main arguments you could use.

The first one is that you cannot run your Drupal platform, your main digital ecosystem, with security vulnerabilities. No one can take the risk of getting hacked these days. With all the sensitive data you might be hosting on the forms, it might impact your brand reputation... It's just NOT an option.
Second - More than the technical upgrade, maybe it's time to revamp the frontend of your website , to comply with the latest accessibility guidelines or the SEO requirements to ensure that your website keeps performing.
Third - You need to think about your editors as well, and give them a modern and accessible content management system that will make their life much easier to manage all the content and the assets for their website. If this still does not work and you still can't convince your boss or your client that they need to upgrade, reach out and will try to paint a darker scenario to convince them!

That's it for today. I want to say a huge shout out to my colleague Duncan Worrell for his impressive research that inspired this video, and the entire writeup that he did around Drupal 10... so thanks, Duncan!

If you have any questions about Drupal CMS or any other digital transformation project you may be working on, feel free to reach out online on Twitter for example.

I hope you found this useful and if you want to hear more tips like this, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.

Selecting a sustainable hosting provider (AWS vs MS Azure vs Google Cloud)

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 20:22:00 +0000

When we think about sustainability, it usually comes from pollution from coal mining factories or large industrial complexes emitting dark smoke. But in the 21st century, where everything is moving to digital, the new modern factory is in the cloud. However, that digital cloud is not floating in the sky. It's made of thousands of concrete buildings, the datacenters, housing millions of computers, the physical servers. That's what's powering all our digital entertainment, online shopping, and most of the business applications we use every day.

What is the true impact of digital transformation on the environment?

When we work in digital and build applications in the cloud, how can we select the most eco-friendly solutions? How can we support our customers who are trying to make ethical buying decisions?

In this article, I'll share with you some recommendations on how to minimize your carbon footprint when working with the cloud. We will compare hosting providers and look at their green credentials. At the end of the article, we'll see that there are more considerations you should take in your digital team. Let's get to it.

First of all, we have to accept that digital transformation is usually a net positive for the environment. For example, when we build applications to process digital records, instead of paper forms manually, or when we use pay-as-you go resources in the cloud, it's much more efficient than keeping your own servers running.

However, research from the Shift Project looked at nearly 170 international studies on the environment and the impact of digital technologies. According to experts, the share of global CO2 emissions increased from 2.5 to 3.7% in the last 10 years. This means that our use of digital technologies is actually close to 4% of the global CO2 emission, which is a bigger carbon footprint than the entire aviation industry. When you have to decide where to host your next web application or digital platform, you're probably gonna go with one of the big three: Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, or Google Cloud... they account for nearly three-quarters of the market share and they're the most reliable technically, so let's focus on those three.

To look at their green and sustainability credentials, the three common metrics to consider are:

The efficiency of the datacenters and infrastructure - such as the cooling system.
The efficiency of the servers themselves.
The source of electricity.

At the infrastructure level, the main metric is the "power usage effectiveness" or PUE which measures the total energy needed to power the datacenter versus the need for computing power.

Are datacenters powered by renewables?

If we focus specifically on the source of power for those data center and look at renewable energy, according to my research (and what those providers are publishing online), it's getting very confusing.

They are all claiming that their "datacenters are being powered 100% by renewables", but it's not very clear and it's not very accurate. Depending on the locations of those datacenters, they're still being connected to the grid that is using fossil fuels. In reality, only a fraction of each company's energy comes directly from wind installations or solar farms.

They rely on "guarantees of origin" in Europe or "renewable energy credits" in the USA to buy carbon offsets, to offset what they're consuming, to offset their emissions.

When we look at those three providers, we can see that Google's greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 are 1.5 mega-tonnes, and they commit to being carbon-free by 2030, with a PUE of 1.1 TTM. Azure has 16 MT on emissions, carbon neutral by 2030, and PUE at 1.17. Finally, AWS was a bit more difficult to gather, 44 MT of emissions, carbon net-zero by 2040 and a PUE under 1.2, we don't have the exact number.

Google Cloud hosting sustainability credentials

Google seems to be open and transparent about all those data and its green efforts. If I had to pick one, Google Cloud would have a slight edge with their datacenter in Iowa US-Central or in Europe-North in Finland being top on the list of their most carbon-free datacenters as shown on this graph.

MS Azure sustainability credentials

For Azure, they don't share the same metrics and from their infrastructure map, it seems like Europe-North in Ireland and East-US2 seems to be the only data centers with the zero-waste certified and the Microsoft Circular Center Certificate available.

AWS sustainability credentials

Finally for AWS, which owns more than a third of the market, they recommend us to "choose the region near Amazon's renewable energy project and regions where the grid has a published carbon intensity that is lower than other locations". So again, it's not really clear, it's quite hard to map directly the impact of their green efforts to their actual datacenter locations. That's the main provider we use and when we have to select the location for new clients, we prioritise probably EU-West 1 in Ireland for EU customers and US-East in North Virginia for US customers, they seem to be the closest match.

It's really hard to understand and compare those big numbers. Those credits offsetting their emission can be seen as a bit of a marketing gimmick.

Other factors to considers for a sustainable web

This is why I think there are many other factors to consider: the main one, and where we have more control over as digital workers, is the need to make more efforts on how we use those cloud resources.

It comes down to us, the technical architects or the senior developers to optimise our web application to run on the right infrastructure and to minimize the number of resources needed. All providers now have a carbon footprint calculator to help us see the impact of our services, such as this one from my AWS account, where you can see your emissions by services and can point you to areas to optimise.

The other point is also on the performance of your code, such as the number of database requests or the frontend libraries that you use, and how you optimise the videos. All of that will make the page and the site heavier to load, requiring more bandwidth to serve the content to your users.

If you're considering upgrading your current platform to be more sustainable, leave me some comments below or just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.

When to launch the MVP for your SaaS application?

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 07:16:01 +0000

When you start building a new digital platform, whether it's a customer portal or software as a service application, there is always a long wishlist of features, like it's never-ending, right?

So how do you approach this challenge and how do you know when the minimum viable product is ready to launch?

In this article & video, I'll share a couple of options depending on the type of product you're launching and how familiar your audience is with your service.

Let's get to it.

Over the years, I've delivered many digital platforms for clients. Those clients - either startups or corporate organisations - usually come to us with a great idea for a new digital platform and a very valid business model.

However, the wishlist of features to be built is either way too long, or sometimes even too simplistic where they haven't thought about the basic admin moderation tools, for example, or the back-office processes and how or what needs to work in the real world, in a production environment.

As you start building on your idea, your stakeholders or investors might want to start pencilling in a date for the launch. Following best practices, you will then start with a sprint zero with a focus on the user experience research, the planning, validating the ideas and documenting to user journeys, and the back-office processes...

You need all of that to then start moving on to development sprints, where you iterate over the features. You'll keep working with the UX and Quality Assurance teams to ensure consistency and that your service / product is answering user needs.

But how long are you supposed to be building? How many development sprints will it take to launch something? That's a genuine question.

What I've discovered is that it really depends on if you're building a brand new product / service, or if you're replacing a legacy system that is already running.

Launching a new product

If you're launching something new, I would recommend going live with your product whenever the end-user - the customer - would feel that they receive some value from the service.

In those situations, there might still be a lot of manual steps in the backend for you, for your business, for your team to process the data, produce the reports in a manual way. However, this is going to be very low scale at the beginning, you won't have hundreds and thousands of users, so you will be able to cope.

This is very important because you're still validating your product market fit. There's no point automating the whole end to end process if you need to pivot in a few weeks/months when you realise that the users don't really want the service that you're building.

Replacing a legacy system

The second option, when replacing a legacy system, means you already have - you already know - there is demand. I'm not saying you can disregard the end-user experience at all, far from that, but you already know what users are doing, what they need, the data they have available and how you process it.

In this situation, the timing of launching the minimum valuable product is whenever it makes life easier for the admin users behind the scenes. The goal of the product will be to reduce the manual back-office processes and to try and automate as much of their workload as possible so you can scale.... that's the main point!

Those are the two main differences we've seen launching new products for startups or corporate organisations alike.

Going live

Going live is always thought of as a scary milestone where everything has to be perfect and fully automated, fully tested, before putting it in front of a single client, in front of real users.

But to be honest, I've never seen a product launching too early. There is always that advantage of getting feedback as soon as possible.

So what do you think? Let me know in the comments below if you've experienced this in your recent digital project and how you dealt with it.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.

Core Web Vitals Mastery Requires a Multi-Disciplinary Team

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 20:11:26 +0000

When Google announced in 2020 that website performance was going to have a greater impact on search engine rankings, the whole industry started to take user experience very seriously.

I have seen that achieving great Core Web Vital scores is really a team effort. You need a multidisciplinary team of experts to achieve the highest results.

From a technical point, page experience is mostly defined by the speed and responsiveness of your website.

It means that to provide greater page experience to your visitors, you need to optimise both the source code and the hosting infrastructure.

You need a web developer to optimise the frontend, HTML and JavaScript code
You also need a DevOps engineer to optimise the caching, compression and storing the assets on CDN and so on.

To achieve scores in the high 90's, I really recommend you involve UX and UI designers as well as QA testers to really build a Core Web Vital dream team around your SEO & Analytics expert who should be leading this workstream.

That's it for today so if you have any question, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.

5 Steps To Fix Your Website's Search Engine

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 08:36:00 +0000

The search feature on your website sucks.

Yes, there, I said it. I'm not taking many risks in saying that because most of the clients we are onboarding come to us with a common need: to revamp their search experience. Poor website's search is often the result of not dedicating enough time, effort, and money into building a good strategy around your website content and search.

Today, I'll share with you the five steps guide to revamp and improve your website's search engine.

Let's get to it.

Talking about search today, it's really becoming a critical part of the end-users' digital experience, don't you agree? With the vast amount of content that is being published, the main goal of your website or your web platform should be for your visitors to find the information they're looking for. It's even more important for e-commerce websites to ensure that your customers find the product that they want to buy.

As we've seen in a previous video, a search box in the header of your website is not a magic solution. There are many root causes for most of the websites' search features issues: from the source content not being tagged properly, when there is no metadata to help categorise it for example... or the out-of-the-box database search that's not smart enough - as it is just using word match and it could be quite limiting - or the lack of UX planning where the content types, the filters, the facets don't make sense and it doesn't help users find what they're looking for.

A Process To Sort Out Your Website's Search

To sort all of those challenges, my team and I came up with a process to audit, upgrade and deploy new websites' search solutions for content-rich websites.

It doesn't really matter if you're using a self-hosted solution such as ElasticSearch or SOLR, or a platform as a service like SearchBlox or Algolia. Those PaaS solutions can provide more advanced AI and Machine Learning algorithms to personalise your search results, but the strategy is the same.

Whatever solution you use, you will need to follow those five steps.

1. Content & Data Fields Audit

First, you need to run a full content audit to identify the content types, what fields need to be prioritised and mark as higher relevancy. You need to review the metadata available and potentially run a clean-up exercise - that could be automated with some of the AI and NLP tools from those PaaS platforms.

2. UX Design of the Seach Page

Second, you need to plan the user experience and design of the page to make the search prominent. On the results page, you need to design clear and clean filters that are efficient. Don't forget to involve the tech teams at that stage, to start thinking about the algorithm and the configuration on how the weighting on some fields can improve the ranking of the results.

3. Indexing Content Into Your Search Engine

Third, you need to index your content into the search engine. This is the process of migration, but it's at that critical step that the parsing and the tagging of the fields will help build the search filters and the actual search feature.

4. Testing All Permutations

Fourth, you need to test! Make sure you plan enough time for this, as there might be several iterations of testing the permutations and tweaking some of the parameters to have more relevant search results. Every time, you need to re-index the content and test. You also need to test for speed, accuracy of the rankings, mobile responsiveness and accessibility amongst others.

5. Use Analytics To Improve Your Search

Finally, you need to plan for the analytics on how you will store and analyse the search queries. This is so you can refine those parameters based on end-users' behaviours. Most importantly, you'll need to measure the conversions, to have KPIs in place and data to demonstrate that investing more time and budget into a great search feature had a positive ROI after all!

With all of these, we've seen amazing results in customer satisfaction and conversion metrics going up on most of the websites' searches we've built.

If you need help to upgrade your current search solution, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.

3 soft skills for software engineers and digital workers

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Sun, 09 Jan 2022 14:16:25 +0000

If you're looking to enter a new career in a digital agency, or if you want to grow in your current role as a software engineer or web developer, you obviously need to be able to write code, write the tests and understand the data structure and algorithm principles.

However, more than those technical skills, I want to share with you today, the top three soft skills that I've seen in the best software engineers / developers I have hired and worked with for the last 15 years in my career of co-running a digital agency.

Why you need more than technical skills

Most things in this world rely on interactions between people to share an idea, execute it and improve it over time. Specifically in the digital world, we use technology to solve real life challenges: making our life better, our processes more productive... This is why the best engineers and software developers need to have those three soft skills.

Clear communication

The first is clear communication. We deliver most projects in a team, so you need to be able to give status updates and share your progress on daily stand-ups for example. You will need to articulate your challenges to highlight any blockers or explain why things might take longer... It applies to both oral communication to share progress, but also in a written format: it's very important. You need to be clear and concise in your writing so you're able to write good commit messages for example, or documentation.

Business acumen

The second soft skill is business understanding. As a digital producer, you are responsible to build something that works well technically, but also provides a good user experience for the end customer.

You might not always receive the full specs in granular details, therefore you need to think about how it will be used, what is the business goal behind it, or why did we ask to build that feature in the first place? I'm not saying that everyone needs an MBA, but you need to understand the basic commercials like how much is the client paying, and what is the actual value that you're producing.

Rigorous with processes

The third soft skill is being very rigorous with processes. In most teams, you will have a set of workflows and best practices that need to be shared between all team members. I know everyone is different and bringing their own skills, experience and personality... that's great. However, the underlying workflow should be consistent so everyone can gain efficiency and avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Of course, you need to be able to challenge those processes with your team if you think it can be done better, but don't do anything in isolation, just on your own!

These apply to all digital workers

Thinking about it, all of those three soft skills really apply to most roles in the digital world and could actually be extended to UX designers or digital marketers. It's the same concepts that apply: they also need to understand the value being produced for the clients, the end users and the overall business objectives.

I think in terms of communication, business acumen and rigorousness with the processes, these are the three things that everyone in the digital space should aspire to master.

That's it for today. On this blog, I will continue to explore best practices to deliver a better website, SaaS and web application portals using user-centered technology. This will help you make better decisions on your next digital project. If you have any questions, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.

12 must-haves on your 2022 digital roadmap (WepApp, SaaS, CMS)

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 22:11:39 +0000

A new year is coming and your web application and digital platform is still running... Well done!, Now it's time for new year's resolutions and I want to make sure that you will stick to them.

In this video, I will share with you the 12 key elements you MUST have in your digital roadmap for next year.

I'm not going to talk about long-term future trends, on how you should jump into the metaverse. Instead, I'm going to list the 12 concrete items that will have the biggest impact on your digital success.

So listen, take notes and start actioning all of them in the next 12 months. Let's get to it.

What should your digital roadmap for 2022 include?

The digital space is constantly evolving and the tech is moving really fast. However, some of the fundamentals never change. This year, more than ever, we have seen a big realisation from most of our clients that they need to get the basics right before they can start investing more budgets into innovation and new features. With this new year coming, it's time to take a step back, look at what you've achieved this year and really refocus your team.

As promised, let's go through the 12 items you must have on your digital roadmap to build a stable base and enable future growth.

1. Better Analytics Reporting

First, you should try to improve your analytics reporting. We all know that to make better decisions, you need to have the data to make informed decisions. It's time to review all your conversion paths on your reports, and really understand where your users are failing, what metric or metrics you could improve by a few percentages to improve your bottom line.

2. Improve Google Core Web Vitals

Second on the list, let's improve your Google Core Web Vitals. Search engines are getting smarter and smarter and behaving like humans. You cannot trick them anymore to try and boost your ranking on the first page. What you should do is optimise your server performance for faster loading times, and review your frontend code, your templates, for faster rendering. There is always room for improvement, and that will have a big impact in your search engine rankings.

3. Reduce Technical Debt

Number three, going a bit into tech: you should continue to reduce your technical debts and aim for something like 20%, for example. You can do that by refactoring your backend code. Just ask your development team what are the main pain points or the biggest complex modules that are slowing them down when building new features. If you book about 20% of their time to improve this into next year, you will greatly improve the stability of your application and the velocity of new features coming out.

4. Pass an Accessibility Audit

In fourth place, you should pass an accessibility audit. Do you even know how compliant your current website and web application are? Have you ever seen how a visually impaired user interact with your website? It's time to make sure you run an independent accessibility audit against the WCAG 2.1 standard. You will get our reports highlighting the main issues to improve your platform, to be more compatible with assistive technology or keyboard navigation, but it will also highlight how to improve your content structure, for example. And again, that will benefit everyone.

5. Review Your Data Privacy Processes

The fifth priority will be to review your data privacy processes. You might have done some work when GDPR and new data privacy laws came out a few years ago, but you've probably added a lot of new features since, your team has grown, and it's probably time to review your end to end process. ISO accredited agencies like mine can help you review how your customers and staff data is being captured, processed, and stored. We'll make sure it matches and is compliant with the regulations. It could avoid some really big headaches in the future.

6. Get Pen-Tested

Number six, and last on those trios of audits that you should do, is passing a penetration test. You need to employ white-hat hackers to try and break both your application - in terms of the source code - and your hosting infrastructure. Even with the best software engineers, the best tools, the best framework, there are always new things coming up, there's always something to improve, or a new vulnerability to patch. Make sure you run those pen tests regularly.

7. Review Your Hosting Bill

Seventh on the list: you should review your hosting bill. Do you know how much you're paying every month for your cloud hosting? Are you taking advantage of the dynamic scaling of cloud infrastructure? Have you even heard of the new serverless solutions or headless CMS generating static sites where you don't even need to run servers anymore? Whatever stage you're at, there's probably some optimisation on costs to be made. At the same time, it's likely you can improve the reliability and the redundancy of the systems. Reach out if you need any help on those.

8. Fix Your Website Search

In eighth place, let's fix your website search. Yes - this is one of the most challenging areas, I know. Especially when you have a content-rich website with lots of different categories and different documents. Every project is very tricky because most of the "out of the box" solutions from most frameworks don't work very well. There's a lot of planning to do in terms of tagging your content, but new technology can help you with that. Once it's indexed in a powerful search engine solution, you can use natural language processing and AI to derive meanings from keywords and identify search intent from your customers. It will really be revolutionary for your end-users, so don't leave that behind.

9. Get a Featured Snippet

Number nine: let's try to get you a featured snippet. This is when Google shows an extract of your webpage at position zero, on top of the search results for a specific keyword. We've achieved those for several clients: it requires a bit of work on your content structure and your website templates, but it can be done with whatever framework you're using. Moreover, it can really boost your traffic for several hundreds of percent for those specific keywords, so let's try to get that on your roadmap.

10. Gain Some Accreditations

In the tenth place, you should gain some accreditations to build trust with your customers. You should reach out to some industry bodies and get certified when the relevant accreditations in your sector. It will help your team to follow best practices, increase your brand trust and allow you to network with other professionals in your industry... Hopefully all of that will help you gain new clients.

11. Go Sustainable

Number eleven, almost there: let's go sustainable. This will be an ongoing trend for decades to come. Our digital industry is waking up too. From the Sustainable Web Manifesto, sustainable web design is an approach to designing and building web services that put people and the planet first. It delivers digital products and services that are clean, efficient, open, honest regenerative, and resilient. I'll explore this in more detail in a future video, so don't forget to subscribe if you want to see this early next year.

12. Validate With Your Users

Last on the list, the twelfth point: you can actually forget about all the tech and the tips I gave you about the digital side. Because it should really focus on your users. I hope you're going to put the 11 items I gave you on this video, on your roadmap, but the MOST important will be to validate this roadmap with your users... both your internal users and your customers. It's not always about adding new features to your products for your end-users, for your paying customers. Sometimes, you need to think about them back-office tools for your internal teams for example. You should ask them what are the repetitive tasks that are taking very long now, and you can automate them more or tweak the process so they spend time doing higher-value work. For our end-users, you should always validate those user stories by running UX audits and proper user acceptance testing with real customers in the field, to make sure that you're building the right thing.

That's it for our roadmap, here are the 12 items that will make the biggest difference in your digital success next year. You should review which one makes more sense for you and reprioritise them... then just try to schedule them, schedule all your efforts to maybe achieve one per month in the next year. That would be really amazing.

I hope you found this useful and that it gave you some ideas.

If you need help with your digital system in 2022, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.

Hosting a corporate #Laravel WebApp - AWS or Azure?

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 20:20:38 +0000

When we develop Laravel web applications for corporate clients and they need to deploy it to a cloud hosting solution, some clients need to keep consistency and will be forced to follow corporate governance and pick a platform for you. However on the agency side, if you had the choice, would you choose AWS or Microsoft Azure?

We went through just that for a client recently. In this video, I will share with you the results of our review and the comparison of which hosting platform makes more sense to host your corporate Laravel web application.

Let's get to it.

As we saw in a recent video, Laravel is widely used in the enterprise market these days. A long list was published on a Twitter thread recently by Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel. You can see here the names like Pfizer, Warner Bros, MasterCard and many others.

Laravel in the Enterprise

That's normal, as Laravel is one of the best open-source frameworks for developers. It comes with a lot of the tools to automate the testing and the deployments. We've been using it for years and gained experience of deploying applications on both AWS and Azure cloud platforms. I never got the chance to try GCP, so reach out if you have more info (and evidence)!

As I was saying, a few weeks ago, a new client asked us to take over their platform from their previous agency and asked us to migrate the Laravel application away from dedicated servers... Yeah, I know it's almost 2022, but it's still happening... They asked us which platform was best?

Cloud hosting: AWS or MS Azure?

We had to compare both platforms to try and convince their IT department, so we looked at several criteria: the setup time, the service compatibility, the compliance, the ongoing maintenance and the overall costs.

So let's compare those platforms and rate them one by one.

1. Setup time

Starting with the setup time, you can deploy hosting with infrastructure as code on both platforms and that's best practices, we all know that. To reduce management time though, the platform as a service offering makes a lot of sense for most use cases and the most common apps. In our experience, the AWS platform as a service is much more mature and all the services work well together. They can be set up in a matter of hours.

With Azure, however, you cannot really automate all of it. There are some additional manual steps when you want to make advanced network security settings for example, which will take several days!

On the set up time, it's 1-nil to AWS.

2. Compatibility with Laravel

Second point on compatibility with the Laravel application: when you run a large Laravel install at scale, it uses a lot of different services from queues and service workers, cache, configuration management, and many others. Having deployed projects on both infrastructures, we found that Microsoft is not as reliable on those advanced services.

It might probably be because historically, AWS has had a better approach and more compatibility with open source technologies. That's a better place to run your Laravel application. You can even plug services like Laravel Forge on top of AWS to take care of everything.

On compatibility, it's 2-nil for AWS.

3. Cloud hosting compliance

Now third on the compliance. Obviously Microsoft has a bigger footprint in the corporate world, usually predating the cloud where most organisations used to run Windows and Exchange mailboxes, those sort of things. Microsoft might have a slight advantage but there's no point comparing the number of industry standards or compliance certifications for each... They're both running and hosting government websites and mission-critical services for medical or defence applications.

Let's call it a tie here, it's 3-1.

4. Maintenance post-launch

Looking at the maintenance post-launch, I've mentioned that for most use cases, a platform as a service minimises maintenance. But the Azure solutions are just not as robust. It seems to require much more time to maintain, tweak and upgrade. We've even seen the Azure team introducing changes to a production environment for queue workers without any warning!

On AWS, it seems that everything just works out of the box for services like Redis or ElasticSearch... you don't need any extra config, it just connects and works.

On the maintenance side, AWS wins again and we're at 4-1.

5. Costs

Finally on the costs: comparing likes-for-likes with an enterprise setup with extra redundancy, multi-availability zones and strict network security policies, the public pricing on Azure is almost three times the price as AWS. I know that most corporate organisations would have very good discounts with Microsoft, however the overall pricing on Azure gets quite complicated between the different database licenses, the multiple tiers of services, or when you start extending across regions...

Again, there's a slight advantage for AWS here, and we're getting to 5-1 in my scores.

And the winner is...

So that's it! Looking at the overall scores: AWS wins! From our experience of managing dozens of projects, AWS is the best platform to run such Laravel applications.

As I said earlier, I have not had the chance to experience GCP, and we've dabbled a little bit with smaller provider such as Digital Ocean for some R&D projects, so reach out if you had success with running corporate project on some of those other platforms.

If you need help with enterprise cloud hosting solutions, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.

Why CTOs pick Laravel PHP for their 2022 digital roadmap

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 07:12:00 +0000

Are you launching a software as a service application, or are you leading a digital transformation program and need to migrate your legacy applications? Whether it's new or old, your technology stack is always evolving, it's the nature of technology. This is why it's important to make the right decisions when you pick a platform and backend stack for your next digital project.

Unfortunately, there is never a right or wrong answer with so many different frameworks and programming languages. It's almost impossible to compare PHP vs .Net vs Ruby vs Python...

In my experience of talking to CTOs from startups all the way to global PLC and even government entities, there are some core technical principles that apply to any business. More importantly, there are business drivers that CTOs are considering when picking a technology stack.

In this video, I'll share with you the five reasons why the Laravel PHP framework is one of the platforms of choice for CTOs and how it will help all of you deliver secure, scalable, and compliant technology solutions in 2022 and beyond.

Let's get to it.

Selecting a web development framework

When it comes to web development, there are so many different programming languages and we can all find the pros and cons about the learning curve, the syntax, the frameworks, the community...

Except for some specialists use cases such as AI algorithm where Python clearly is the best programming language with more advanced libraries, for most digital applications in many businesses, the technology stack - and its selection - usually comes down to personal preferences, we have to be honest. There are very few technical differences for most use cases.

In this article, I want to highlight more business-focus reasons on why I see our clients pick the Laravel framework as their preferred technology platform.

Here are my top 5:

1. Laravel is feature-rich

Laravel follows programming best practices and it's a framework that scales with you and your business. Thanks to the code being very clean, it gives developers the ability to refactor and improve easily as you grow. Laravel has a lot of features available out of the box, such as the authentication module, the templating engine, testing, queues, events, multi-tenancy, the ORM... Everything is very modular and it gives freedom to developers to implement either monolithic or microservices architecture as they wish. Additionally, there is a whole ecosystem of products for full-text search, subscription management, deployments and many others.

2. Laravel is cloud-agnostic

You can basically deploy a Laravel WebApp anywhere. You just need a basic server stack, and obviously it can scale with multi-availability zone, different databases and all the network configurations you want.

We've deployed it successfully on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and the Gov.uk PaaS platform with different types of databases from RDS, MSSQL or PostgreSQL, it's very simple. You can deploy it as a containerised application or even serverless with the new Laravel Vapor platform. This means it will be compatible with whatever your company hosting policies is and it's a great benefit.

3. Laravel is performant & secure

I'm not just talking about the speed of execution, but the automated tests, the ability to change drivers, the use of queues and all of the features that come out of the box. Laravel also benefits from a robust underlying base and patching strategy to keep it very secure.

We've gone through dozens of very strict due diligence and pentesting, audits, and Laravel has always been approved for release... it's another thumbs up.

4. Laravel has huge community support

Laravel is the most rated PHP framework on GitHub. It's got lots of plugins and composer libraries from external parties.

It's also easier to recruit than other more niche languages, because all developers want to use the latest trendy framework. Laravel is definitely aligned with that! It's got great HR benefits for growing teams.

5. Laravel raises developers' satisfaction

Even if we're talking about technology here and security and compliance, software is actually built by people for people. The developers need to enjoy their work and be given the tools to be creative, come up with solutions and write beautiful code.

I feel like Laravel is the best framework to do that.

Those are the five reasons why Laravel is so popular among the developer community and why CTOs are using it to drive their 2022 roadmap.

It's not the silver bullet

Remember it's not the silver bullet that will solve all your digital challenges. At the end of the day, it's not the tools or the tech that "make or break" a business: it is the people and the processes.

I've seen some terrible implementations of Laravel where we've had to come in and rescue projects that had become unmanageable. Just with a bit of better communication with the business and the client's product owner, a bit of refactoring of the code, an upgrade to the processes & the delivery pipeline for how we work as a team, we've got it back on track. Just remember that some codebases just need more love and care!

That's it for today. If you need help to pick your next technology stack or already have a Laravel application that you need support with, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.

Raising funds for your web app? Get ready for a tough tech audit!

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 16:04:45 +0000

I just came out of an investors' due diligence audit on the SaaS platform we are building for a client who's raising external investment. Let me tell you, it was a wild ride! Their technical consultant thoroughly went through everything with a fine tooth-comb... It was pretty intense. The good news is that it went well!

In this video, I want to share with you the main items to look out for so you don't have any surprises and you can get ready next time you get an audit from your future investors, for the next unicorn app that you're building.

Let's get to it.

Why do investors need a tech due-diligence?

When you build a digital product, either as a bootstrap business or as part of a growth strategy to launch a new product to new verticals, in most cases, there will come a point where you either need to raise funds to grow, or sell your platform/app entirely and exit.

In both cases, those investors - from private equity firms or at later rounds of venture capital - will want to run a full technical due diligence on the platform architecture against several criteria. This will give them the peace of mind that there is a solid base, that their investment is safe. If they're bringing several millions of dollars or pounds, they'll want to make sure that the actual product that is built is not unstable and it's not going to crash like a deck of cards, or could collapse at any time when you add the next feature, or when you start driving more traffic and more users to it.

However, those finance guys are no tech experts. They usually bring external consultants who specialise in this type of technology - like web applications. They are not necessarily experts in a specific programming language: they will follow the concepts and best practices for digital applications.

Their goal is really to find technical impediments that would negatively impact the growth objectives for the investors.

To that effect, they will be very thorough and look at four main components.

1. Product audit and roadmap

The first one is the product. They will look at the basic features, the end-to-end user journeys, and what else is coming up in your roadmap. They will look at the existing market you are attracting, but more importantly, the potential addressable market for growth.

This means they're going to have to look at rolling out your product in other verticals or whitelabelling it to resell the same service to partners under different brands for example. This is key: as we said, most of the time they will be looking for growth.

2. Source code maintainability

The second point would be source code audit, looking at the development tools that you are using and the repository of the source code. They will be looking for automated test coverage, how the different models and controllers are structured, the database format... as well as how you monitor the performance to try and identify potential bottlenecks when your traffic increases 5 or 10-fold.

They will also be looking for documentation to share knowledge and onboard new team members, so you don't get stuck when one specific developer resigns and takes all the knowledge away.

And finally, they'll make sure the code is written to a maintainable way and that there is no legacy issue. In the developer community, we talk about "spaghetti code" where everything is disorganised and you cannot do anything with it! So that's one thing to plan well from the beginning.

3. Hosting architecture for scale

The third point is the hosting architecture. In most cases these days, a digital app would be hosted in the cloud. They'll be auditing services that you use, the type of servers, database caching, queues, email system, and so on. Similar to the code audit, they will be focusing their attention on performance and redundancy. This will help them identify the potential points of failure and how the architecture can scale without major refactoring.

One of the main things to be clear about with the auditor early on, is the stage of your delivery, the stage that you're at with your product. Are you still building the MVP, or do you have all the features you need to scale and take it global? That will impact some of your decisions:

There is no point implementing a fully distributed architecture if you're still at the MVP stage trying to validate the concept.

4. Processes for security & compliance

The final and fourth point is your processes. The auditor will be looking at the compliance against the data privacy regulations in your region. They will also be looking at the security elements of your hosting, such as penetration testing and disaster recovery planning. Finally, they will review your development process around agile, regression testing and how you support your application with SLAs. If you're planning on scaling globally, you might need to upgrade your team and your processes to cover 24/7 support.

In our case, the application we built for this client was a custom-built application. However, one of the risky areas that I would want to explore more in a future video is how you approach this type of audit if you have built your MVP with a no-code or low-code technology... You usually would have less control over some of those elements and you might have to refactor some of it to scale.

Most of the time, the items I shared today will not necessarily make or break a potential investment deal. However, it may impact the level of commitment or paint a more realistic picture to the investors about the state of your technical platform, and where you can take it.

This is why it's important to take all of that very seriously. If you're considering taking your web application to the next level and need a reliable partner to ensure smooth technical audits on your platform, or tweak your processes so you can demonstrate that it's ready to scale, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.

Agency VS Freelancer - who should you hire?

Sylvain Reiter / The UX CTO — Sun, 24 Oct 2021 07:47:33 +0000

We regularly receive enquiries from potential clients who need help with their digital system, be it a website, or a customer portal or an e-commerce platform. Most of the time, they come to us with a statement like "I'm looking for a web designer to help me rebuild my website".

The challenge with this statement is that the world of digital transformation is covering such a wide range of skills and techniques... it's really hard these days to find a single resource to do it all, who has the skills to do everything.

The unicorn designer / developer! Credit https://github.com/nocama

Obviously, for a small brochure website or simple landing page, a freelancer is usually the most cost-effective solution. Some of the most talented web designers can do both the design and the development and coding of the website.

However, for larger corporate projects that need a full revamp end-to-end, you will need a mix of different skills and expertise from UX and design, frontend, backend, QA testing, DevOps as well as a project manager to synchronise everything and make it happen.

In this video, I want to explore the main differences and risks that you should consider when you are hesitating between hiring an individual freelancer versus a digital agency with a bigger team.

Let's get to it.

The risks with freelancers

Looking at this "freelancer versus digital agency", I would obviously be a bit biased because I co-run an agency. However, I'm sharing this today because, over the years, I have seen so many clients reaching out to us to take over projects that were going in the wrong direction or turned out to become completely unmanageable. Most of the time, I have to be honest with clients and say: "well, you got what you paid for"! You tried to do it in a cost-effective solution, but it didn't always work.

Identify what you need

If you are involved in a digital transformation project, you first need to identify the skills that you have in-house, in your existing team. If you already have designers or developers, and you're lacking expertise in a very narrow area, i.e. a specific type of user research or technology like ReactJS, adding a freelancer to your internal team, that you can embed in your process and manage day-to-day, will make sense.

Agency or Freelancer?

However, no matter whether you're on the marketing side or in the IT Solutions' team, if you need to launch a new product or revamp your website / customer portal, and if your internal resources are already busy, you will need an agency.

The main drawback will usually be cost obviously, as an agency's rates will sometimes be more than double those of an individual freelancer. But I think the following five reasons mean it's really worth it.

1. Reliability

The first one is reliability. An agency won't disappear overnight. When you hire a team, they usually have multiple clients that should keep them in business for several years - if they are doing a good job! Whereas a freelancer may get ill or need to take time off, and then you will get stuck without any resources. On the resourcing side, agencies plan several weeks in advance and they always ensure that there is cover in place and a handover for any team member when they go on holiday for example.

2. Knowledge sharing

The second point is knowledge sharing. An agency of a certain size, let's say 20 to 30 staff and above, will have multiple experts and team leads who would be involved in reviewing the designs or approving the code pull requests. Those agency teams will organize weekly team meetings to share best practices across their projects... that will benefit your own project as well.

3. Specific expertise

The third point is the specific expertise. Most agencies would have individual specialists in multiple areas of digital transformation, from marketing, design, dev QA... From a development perspective, it's almost impossible to find unicorn freelance developers who can master the full stack of frontend, backend and JavaScript. With an agency, you would have access to multiple expert resources throughout the projects, depending on the requirements.

4. Security & Compliance

Fourth is security, accessibility, and performance. The best agencies, like ours, will have a well-documented operational process and accreditations. At Cyber-Duck, we are one of the few UK agencies to be triple ISO-certified for human centered design, quality management and information security management. We also have the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation and are members of various associations around accessibility and privacy compliance. We bake all of that into every project. It's such robust processes and security credentials that will give you the peace of mind... That's something, an individual freelancer cannot claim.

5. Account Management

The fifth and last point is account management. Whilst the best freelancers can do the job, communicate well and be proactive, in an agency you will benefit from an account management function. You will have a dedicated project manager, as well as an account manager, acting as strategists and making recommendations, as well as handling any issue that needs to be escalated, without distracting the production team doing the work.

So overall, these are the 5 main benefits of hiring an agency over a freelancer.

If you need support for your next digital transformation project, or if you're struggling to manage a project with your existing team, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.

Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.