Sakewiz came with the concept of “Connecting the world with sake” in the hope of spreading sake to the world. Sake is a wonderful product that can be proud of in the world and symbolizes Japanese food culture. While people around the world are paying attention to sake, issues such as the difficulty of understanding sake and too many types are pointed out. It is a company that was founded to make Japanese sake more enjoyable by utilizing IT on these issues.
Business Challenges
Find a reliable software vendor who-
- had tourism industry experience
- was capable of architecturing cost-effective software solutions
- could build enterprise-level multiplatform Sake Tourism system
Embrace the experience for the people who have interest in Sakes and also exploring them in Japan via pick-stop on maps.
Integrating the vendors of sakes where it is produced or sold with the platform so as to make them visible on maps as well.
Product Scope
Create an environment through a platform that includes different circles, containing:
- People who want to explore breweries and Sakes in Japan.
- Vendors who are producing/ selling breweries/Sakes.
- Admin who will be responsible for showing the data of all through the platform including maps.
Build a holistic solution that:
- Enables most Sakes/Breweries Vendors to be done from a single platform.
- Creates a secure, user-friendly environment & map-based platform.
- Captures the data required for the people and the Breweries/Sakes Producers and displays it on the platform.
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Curated & Easy to operate the platform consisting:
- Mention the Place in Japan where people want to explore Sakes.
- Show them the list for the same and can display it on the maps for better direction.
- People can find tours by the help of selecting prefectures and breweries from the defined list.
- They can also see the pictures and videos related to that.
Product discovery
Analysis. Define business requirements, determine the product’s market positioning, analyze the product architecture, and elicit the best technical solutions.
Design. Create a product vision and roadmap and build an architectural design in line with business goals.
Requirements. Formalize the product vision into the product scope for the development team and perform initial project setup.
Managing Several Group of Stakeholders
This project requires us to work with different groups of Stakeholders who contribute to the project backlog:
- Sakewiz Tourism (Product Owners)
- Sakewiz’s Clients (Producers who produce Sakes, Vendors who sell from their places & people who are exploring Japan and interested in Breweries and Sake.)
- 3rd Party Integration Providers (One of the sources for technical requirements)
To align the processing of Stakeholders’ input, we:
- Developed a stakeholder management strategy to balance expectations of different groups of external stakeholders and ensure all their functionality requests were properly prioritized and delivered.
- Rebuilt the technical workflow in line with our stakeholder management framework, which involved implementing a CI/CD pipeline and implementing a GitFlow branching code.
- Adjusted project delivery to the stakeholders’ management framework once Sakewiz got new clients
Ensuring quick team scaling
During the tenure of almost 2 years of our collaboration, there are several times when we had to quickly scale the project team. The last time, we had just a couple of weeks to scale the team from 5 to 12 people. To ensure fast and smooth scaling, we:
- rebuilt the management structure and implemented partially independent domain pods for specific project units.
- embedded a new structure of technical leadership
- assigned a dedicated resource manager who knew the project context
- established an onboarding process that included learning the project documentation, workshops conducted and mentored by tech leads.
Simple UX for a complex product
We had to make complex functionality clear, intuitive, and user-friendly for non-techies, people with disabilities, and different age groups. The Sakewiz platform includes many user roles, and we made the UX comfortable for all users by:
- building a consistent information architecture that’s scalable enough to allow for future implementations
- adapting the design to the needs of users in different age groups
- making the system convenient for people who want to Explore Japanese Food Culture.
- Ensuring the best user experience and flawless communication between vendors who are providing Japanese Hospitality and people exploring different places in Japan.
I was really pleased choosing Benthon Labs for our Mobile and web application testing including functional and automation testing. They are quite professional in their work. We had a large project which they delivered as promised. Everyone from front-end back-end, QA did an exceptional job taking our project to the finish line.
SakeWiz, President & CEO
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