Integrating an Acquired Startup Mailchimp Creative Assistant
In 2018, Mailchimp’s acquired Sawa, an automated graphic design tool. They needed to integrate the Sawa product into their ecosystem and get these new features to their customers quickly. But startup integration is notoriously difficult and complex, and Mailchimp didn’t have a dedicated team of people ready to do the difficult work of integration. Also, the Sawa team was still very small, since as a startup they had been running hard on a low budget for years.
Full integration of an acquired startup a in under 12 months.
Sawa had a user base of thousands of users and Mailchimp has a user base of millions, so we needed to upgrade Sawa’s systems from a startup infrastructure to an enterprise infrastructure.
The Tensure team was able to get Creative Assistant to Mailchimp customers by continuously delivering value in incremental pieces. With our first release, we were able to help the team conduct user research, integrate the Sawa microservices into the Mailchimp monolith, and implement the features necessary for a Mailchimp customer to generate on-brand content for their emails.
We accomplished this by:
Most importantly we were able to make these changes and deliver value to Mailchimp’s users in under 12 months.
In transforming Sawa’s core technology into the current fully-featured Creative Assistant tool inside the Mailchimp platform, The Tensure team provided nearly end-to-end development by bringing in Product Leadership, Technical Product Management, Architecture Oversight, Full-Stack Development, UX/UI, and user research.
Benefits:
"After working with Tensure engineers for nearly two years, I can confidently say they have an incredible work ethic. They are dedicated to solving the problem for our customers, and they simply don’t give up until they find the best solution."
