How to assemble a team

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The first step before starting to develop a router is to form a team. If you have not worked with navigation services before, then most likely you will have to recruit it from scratch. At a minimum, you will need developers in the stack on which you will create the service, and specialists in geoanalytics with a cartographic education.

It is important that the whole process is led by a person who understands cartography in detail, knows how other cartographic products are built, and understands not only the needs but also the limitations. Otherwise, you can come up with some kind of spaceship that will never take off.

The cartographic specifics also give rise to the peculiarities belize whatsapp phone number of the team’s work, which we did not take into account at the start of the project, and this cost us many mistakes and unnecessary work.

Initially, we assembled a router team in the image and likeness of other product teams. That is, there was a product, developers, analysts and a standard flow: a business requirement was born, we discussed it, cut it into tasks, completed them, analyzed the result. If it took off - great, if not - we think further.

We didn't take into account that to create a mapping service, you need to spend a lot of time and resources on painstaking work with data. Literally opening maps and manually checking: did the filter work correctly, is there really a bike path there, does it connect correctly with the next one. The team of such services usually has junior cartographers, students or recent students who do this important work. We didn't take this into account at the very beginning, so we encountered a series of rookie mistakes, which led to not the best quality of some routes.

As a result, we changed the team composition, shifting the focus to the cartography and geoanalytics stack. This helped us achieve the ideal mix of competencies and resources. Now the router and map team has about 15 people, some of whom are involved partially at the right moments of development. Of these, 7 people are geoanalysts, cartographers and product analysts, 8 are the product team: product manager, Java, Python, Go developers, mobile application developers (iOS, Android), UX/UI designer, QA engineer.