With a new app comes new features! 🚀 The Poppy team has been working for months to make it even easier and funnier ! 🎯 What to expect first ?
- 📲 Login with your phone number
- 💳 Bancontact as your preferred payment method for pay as you go and credits packages purchases
- 💰 Buy your prepaid credit packages directly in the app (more info on packs)
- ♥️ Invite friends and receive free credits
- 👀 More coming very soon !
But we don't say more. Thibaut, CTO at Poppy, tells you everything 🤖 📲 👇🏼
🎙 THIBAUT, CAN YOU PRESENT THE TEAM ?
We’re just 5 in the Product Engineering department: Arnaud, Nordine, Simon, Wout and myself. Everybody is what we call a fullstack developer which means anyone can develop parts of the mobile app or of the platform behind it. Additionally we all wear multiple hats of product management 📲, data science 🧠 or even interface design. 👨🏻🎨
🎙 WHEN AND WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO CREATE A 100% IN HOUSE APPLICATION ?
One year ago, we realized we had reached the limit in terms of customization with the turnkey solution that was powering our previous app. That solution is what allowed POPPY to take off but ultimately we wanted full control of the product roadmap to better serve the needs of our customers and improve the efficiency of operations. 🚀
🎙 WHEN DID YOU ACTUALLY START AND WHAT WAS THE PROCESS ?
We started precisely 10 months ago with a bare bone minimal app. The goal was to be able to iterate quickly from a prototype that allowed you to book and drive almost from the beginning. From there we worked in “sprints” of 4 weeks, each iteration bringing new features and improvements. After 5 months we had reached a good level of usability and released the app internally so around November 2020. In February we asked some of our most active users to test a preview version of the app. We tried our best to respond to the feedback we received by improving, refining and fixing every feature. 🤝
🎙 WHAT WERE THE MAIN CHALLENGES AND WHAT WAS THE IMPACT OF THE COVID SITUATION ? HOW DID YOU ADJUST ?
Covid confinement measures were put in place around the time we started working on the app. Since the team is very new we only got to work all in the same room for 2 months. That was kind of a downer for team spirit but I think that overall we adjusted well for two reasons: one being that we often have on ongoing call on Slack that anybody can join or leave whenever they want so nobody was left on their own and second the very nature of coding actually requires some quiet focused time.
🎙 WHAT CAN PEOPLE EXPECT FROM THIS NEW APP & WHAT ARE YOU THE MOST PROUD OF ?
The release of the new app is only the beginning. It’s basically a clean slate that will allow us to move faster, update the app very often to release new features and bugfixes at a good pace. I’m the most proud of the team which put a lot of intelligence and effort into this adventure and of the whole POPPY asskicking team in general as everybody always supported us the best they could by testing, adjusting their way of working or helping deal with customers' feedback.
🎙 WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR THE UPCOMING WEEKS OR MONTHS ?
There’s going to be a phase where we stabilize the app even further. Even with a thousand beta testers you cannot anticipate all the issues that could happen when you onboard thousands more. Then we have this big IOT project where we’re going to replace the hardware of our cars with a better solution providing more telematics data and more accurate GPS location.
Finally there’s a big part of the work that is not customer facing that we put aside for a while that we’re going to have to tackle: backoffice interfaces, monitoring for operations, etc. 📊
🎙 WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE IF YOU HAD KNOWN ?
In the preview versions of the app you still authenticated on the new app with your email. At the very last minute we decided to change that to an sms authentication. Starting with SMS would have avoided us quite some additional work. People are just used to authenticating on mobile with their phone number just like they do on Whatsapp. Actually lots of our users don’t even have a configured email account reachable from their phone. I wish we had understood that earlier.
🎙 FUNNY STORY TO TELL OR SECRET TO REVEAL ?
Let’s just say that physical fuel cards in a glove box are soon going to be a thing of the past 😉
To celebrate this BIG news, enjoy 3 euros FREE credits with the code* : APPMAZING
*Code valid until 30/04/2021 included. Only in the new app.