Household Management Web App
Bluepine
Bluepine is revolutionizing the household management space, providing a platform for homeowners, home managers, and service providers to seamlessly connect.
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Chicago-based startup Bluepine came to Atomic with an industry-shifting concept. They had a thoughtful business plan and were eager to build a minimum viable product (MVP) to test their approach with live customers and to support future fundraising.
Their idea? Imagine Sarah, a busy professional with homes in Chicago and Florida. She relies on Stewart, the home manager she’s employed, for her property’s upkeep. Stewart uses the Bluepine app to keep track of both homes’ details—from its HVAC models to wall paint colors.
When Stewart finds a malfunctioning thermostat in the Florida home and notices the cooling isn’t working, he uses Bluepine to look up the model, snaps a photo of a problem, and requests service through the app. A local provider views the photo, diagnoses the problem, and schedules a repair for the following day—all within the mobile app.
By centralizing home maintenance details and service requests, Bluepine simplifies communication between homeowners, home managers, and service providers, ensuring efficient task and repair management.
Recognizing the need for an MVP, Bluepine’s leaders faced a decision: start the lengthy process of assembling an internal development team or forge a strategic partnership with an experienced firm. They opted to hire Atomic Object because of a cultural alignment and their urgency to release to live customers while forging a new product category.
Jon Cobin, CEO of Bluepine
Coordinating Stakeholders
Process from Idea to Production
In addition to their goal of developing an MVP quickly, Bluepine hired Atomic to develop a product that would attract early users. They wanted a firm with enough experience to help them prioritize which features and functionalities would achieve this business objective. They also wanted to find a partner who would leave them ready to take over the project themselves after the initial release.
With a clear vision, Bluepine needed a methodology to refine and test their ideas. Atomic introduced a rigorous, collaborative, and iterative approach to MVP development that brought both structure and pace to the process of building Bluepine.
Bluepine capitalized on Atomic’s team through discovery workshops and weekly sessions held in Atomic’s Chicago office. Together, they honed in on the app’s design and business plan, discussing questions like, “How does app functionality need to vary across user personas?” and, “How can we prioritize features to ensure a good user experience even while seeking initial feedback?”
For example, from this process and based on user feedback, they decided to integrate photo and video into service requests. This allows quicker diagnostics, more efficient scheduling, and more transparency between homeowners, home managers, and service providers.
Atomic Delivery Lead Laura Corona said from these discussions, the teams created wireframes to present to potential users before spending the resources to develop features. As the team gleaned more feedback, they iterated on the backlog. The product evolved week by week.
“They were part of the framing process,” she said. “They were whiteboarding. They were coming up with ideas with us. They saw us go from idea, to design, to implementation, to showing it to a customer in rapid succession.”
Bluepine CEO Jon Cobin says this collaborative process of hypothesis-testing and feature-prioritization was instrumental in refining their direction.
“Working with Atomic brought us tremendous speed in figuring out where we were actually going with the MVP,” he said.
After finalizing the direction, Bluepine and Atomic accelerated onto a continuous cycle of design and development towards the MVP.
Cobin says he appreciated how Atomic’s consultants carefully prioritized developer tasks to ensure that resources were channeled into the right features.
"We wouldn't have gotten from a blank sheet of paper to the MVP without the partnership,” he said, “and we certainly wouldn't have done it as quickly, efficiently, and effectively."
Technical Specs
Atomic designed the system architecture and wrote software and firmware for:
Phase 2: Developing a Full-feature Workshop Experience
With the Learning Map developed into a digital product, Root wanted to further help users dive into their organization’s strategy, financials, or processes with a second release. Among other features, they sought to create a kind of a virtual whiteboard, where everyone’s voice could be heard in a fun, engaging, and meaningful way.
Atomic’s Software Design Practice Lead in Ann Arbor, Bryan Elkus, led design work on the project. He saw the user experience of going through the Learning Map activities as a type of collaborative online challenge.
Under the guidance of Atomic's Software Consultant & Designer Bryan Elkus, the project emphasized collaborative user experiences, akin to an online group challenge, focusing on:
- Consultants facilitating onboarding, ice-breakers, and exercises.
- Client company employees engaging in organizational change.
Atomic Object Software Consultant & Developer Matt Soto his development work focused on delivering Root’s vision of polish, complex features, and emphasizing a business model around the digital product.
Root's VP, Nate Butki says Atomic’s consultative approach helped the project team uncover and address underlying needs rather than merely executing requests.
“Atomic didn’t want to just figure out what we wanted and give it to us—but rather figured out the need and helped us with it,” he said. “If they had listened to us and spit out exactly what we asked for, they would have only gotten 80 percent of it. Atomic’s team asked the questions and pushed us further.”
Technical Specs
Atomic designed the system architecture and wrote software and firmware for:
Phase 2: Developing a Full-feature Workshop Experience
With the Learning Map developed into a digital product, Root wanted to further help users dive into their organization’s strategy, financials, or processes with a second release. Among other features, they sought to create a kind of a virtual whiteboard, where everyone’s voice could be heard in a fun, engaging, and meaningful way.
Atomic’s Software Design Practice Lead in Ann Arbor, Bryan Elkus, led design work on the project. He saw the user experience of going through the Learning Map activities as a type of collaborative online challenge.
Under the guidance of Atomic's Software Consultant & Designer Bryan Elkus, the project emphasized collaborative user experiences, akin to an online group challenge, focusing on:
• Consultants facilitating onboarding, ice-breakers, and exercises.
• Client company employees engaging in organizational change.
Atomic Object Software Consultant & Developer Matt Soto his development work focused on delivering Root’s vision of polish, complex features, and emphasizing a business model around the digital product. Root's VP, Nate Butki says Atomic’s consultative approach helped the project team uncover and address underlying needs rather than merely executing requests.
“Atomic didn’t want to just figure out what we wanted and give it to us—but rather figured out the need and helped us with it,” he said. “If they had listened to us and spit out exactly what we asked for, they would have only gotten 80 percent of it. Atomic’s team asked the questions and pushed us further.”
Nate Butki, Root VP
Finding the Right Platform
In the journey from ideation to a market-ready product, the team used user research to validate that Bluepine's vision was grounded in real user needs and business viability. With Atomic, they had an entire product team dedicated to ideating about the best product and testing and validating hypotheses about how that product would work for users.
For example, Bluepine wasn’t sure how much functionality could be supported in a mobile app versus a desktop-accessed web app given the amount of information and complexity involved. Atomic consultants demonstrated that a mobile-first progressive web app would support MVP functionality while enabling rapid incorporation of user feedback across both mobile and desktop use cases. Cobin says Atomic worked to understand, prioritize, and continuously learn about his company’s business goals, which influenced the success of the project.
"Without a properly structured team that equally prioritizes business objectives, user experience, and tech requirements, clients might find themselves frustrated by a skewed focus on just one aspect,” he said. “The key is to have someone on the other side who appreciates and actively participates in this delicate balancing process."
Building a Sustainable Team
Because Bluepine knew they wanted to build an in-house team around their new software product, they employed Atomic’s expertise to help assemble one.
The client came to Atomic with no in-house developers or designers and had successfully onboarded a full-time team of four developers and a lead designer by the end of the project. Atomic consultants were involved in all aspects of building Bluepine’s design and development team by helping outline position specifications, creating technical aptitude tests, vetting candidates for cultural alignment, and embedding newly hired team members with Atomic’s team at its office for months.
Atomic also planned ahead for disengagement. The ramp-off process ensured Bluepine’s team was prepared with a development backlog and a transition of all project management duties. It was a very warm hand-off, with Atomic involved in the transition and remaining available to support any questions and issues that arose.
A new developer at Bluepine hired after the engagement ended said he was impressed by the handoff they inherited.
“I just can't believe how seamless this was,” he said. “I felt like from day one, everything was kind of laid out to help me.”
Cobin is seeing business value from the transition as well.
“I’m delighted and proud of our team’s culture. Atomic was pivotal in helping us establish it.”
Taste-testing the Product in the Field
Delivering A Great Product and An Empowered Team
By getting to share their decades’ experience with agile practices, Atomic’s team got to watch the counterparts at Root develop new skills over the course of the second engagement.
Soto says he loved watching Root’s inherently collaborative culture adopt the agible practices they were learning.
“After a few months, they loved how easy and smooth it was to make last-minute changes, to pivot in another direction, and use feedback to spend their time where it was most impactful,” he said.
Root’s Jared Page says the agile approach to product design, development, and management he saw during the engagement had a profound impact.
“One of my favorite things about this project is that everyone got better—better at our jobs and better with communication; it just feels cool,” he said. “Sometimes you work for a year and don’t know if you’ve improved but everyone could look back on this project and say they’ve improved. This project changed the way I will work forever.”
Building the Team Together
An MVP Ready to Pitch to Investors
Thanks to teamwork, product development rigor, focus on speed, and ability to build in-house capabilities, Bluepine was transformed into a tech-savvy startup with a promising MVP and a skilled in-house team by the time Atomic rolled off.
Everything is in place for Bluepine to continue using agile methodologies and Atomic’s best business and development practices as the company matures.
Cobin says Bluepine has received positive feedback from its selected initial users in the Chicago area and has been successfully pitching investors with a working product in hand.
"Instead of relying on a pitch deck alone, we can let the software do the talking,” he said. “The MVP has transformed how we engage with investors, offering them a hands-on look at the app, which is a lot better of a conversation when selling our vision."
Bluepine recently closed a tranche of seed funding bringing the company’s total invested capital to $2 million, the proceeds of which are being used primarily to continue product development and refine the company’s commercialization plans.
"Instead of relying on PowerPoint, we can let the software do the talking. The MVP has transformed how we engage with investors, offering them a hands-on look at the app, which is a lot better of a conversation when selling our product."
Coordinating Stakeholders
A Partnership with a Storybook Ending
The team’s careful project management, client communication, cutting-edge architecture, and cohesive design strategy helped the team ship the product on time and on budget.
Reflecting back on the multi-year, high-profile project, Robinson said Atomic helped his company arrive at a special moment in time.
“We'd never done anything this big. Ever,” he said. “We’re live across all the major pillars Atomic said they would deliver on. It was delivered on time, on budget, to expectation, live. Not three or four milestones late with people leaving and the platform half-baked and full of bugs.”
StoryLoom began open-beta in December 2022. A global launch is scheduled for the spring of 2023.
“We’ve been given a rare opportunity," said Robinson, "to find success by chasing opportunities Starship Enterprise-style: going where people aren’t—pushing boundaries.”
The Atomic Team
Here are some of our current Atoms who worked on this project. Click their photo to read their bios!
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