Mebelhouse

Mebelhouse has been selling premium garden and office furniture since 1996 and is one of the most visible companies in its segment in Uzbekistan. Four showrooms, a big warehouse, 15 couriers, 30 to 50 staff and orders every day. The customer base is large, and all the bookkeeping was moving into one system. The owners, people I know well, asked me to take a look at the development plan.

We went through the plan and the milestones. On paper the scope was huge: an ERP, a POS, apps for couriers, sellers, warehouse staff and assemblers. And the deadline was six months. From my own experience I said straight away: you can't build that from scratch in that time. Later the development team itself honestly admitted it had taken on too short a deadline for a job that size.

The owners needed someone on the product side, so I was the one going to the meetings with the developers. We agreed that the breakdown had happened on the product side, and they made me an offer: then you be the product, give us the flows, and we'll follow them. I gave them my flows. In effect it was a fresh start, but there was little time, so I didn't redo everything: I fixed the scenarios where there was no way around it and optimized what already worked.

The project passed the six-month mark, crept toward a year and still wasn't finishing. So I took it on myself, and two months later we launched. Normally you don't do this: you don't pick up someone else's half-built project, anyone who knows better builds from scratch with their own team. But there was no time for that, and picking it up turned out to be faster.

The funniest part I learned later. One developer from that team turned out to know our mobile developer, the one we'd worked with back at Dokon, and told him: “some product guy came in and turned everything upside down” xD Guilty as charged. Now the POS, the couriers and the rest of the apps are on me, and everything runs smoothly.