Garden Connect accelerates product development
2019 was another successful year for Garden Connect: new customers from many countries joined and new services have been introduced into the garden industry. To ensure this steady growth in the upcoming years, we decided to set up a development team in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
The reason to hire a new development team in Sri Lanka is based on the ambition to develop new services: "We're always aiming to bring new solutions to the garden industry. To increase the speed of development, we wanted to hire a team of 4 developers. We tried to hire them locally but it's hard to find experienced developers in the Amsterdam area." explains Edwin Meijer, founder of Garden Connect.
Colombo
"During this process, we came across a Dutch company helping agencies to find the right staff in Colombo. We're not outsourcing any development since we hand-picked every team member working in Colombo. After 35 online interviews, we decided to go to Colombo and had another 11 face to face meetings. Eventually, we decided to hire 4 developers to start with. They are working solely for Garden Connect and we're having daily stand-ups with them." All developers have at least 5 years of experience and are living in the Colombo-area.
Amsterdam visit
As part of the process, Garden Connect invited the team of developers to visit the Amsterdam-office. "It's important to get to know each other so we had a week full of meetings. Some were work-related but we also wanted to give them a sense of Dutch culture. The developers also visited multiple garden centres. Again, we're not outsourcing our development to an anonymous mailbox so we felt we should invest some time on getting to know each other well."
In the upcoming year, the team of developers will come back to Amsterdam and developers of Garden Connect will visit the Colombo office to catch up with their new colleagues.
Innovations
"We feel this is an import move forward for Garden Connect since it will allow us to increase the speed of product development and to bring new innovations to the garden industry." concludes Edwin Meijer.
