Moodtracker®: Building an Award Winning Application in Dublin
October 2020, Moodtracker® was named an HR Product of the Year by HR Executive Magazine. This was an amazing achievement, especially considering that we built the application in just four months in the middle of a global pandemic. Here’s how we did it.
Let’s start at the very beginning….
In late 2019, Workhuman® made the momentous decision to get into the survey business.
At the time, people leaders and HR departments who wanted to survey their teams faced two painful choices:
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Struggle with free, online platforms to put together a survey – unsure which questions to ask in order to attain the desired results or
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Pay potentially large sums of money to data companies to run surveys on their behalf or give them a template they could use to analyse their organisation, which may or may not tell them what they need to know.
This could be particularly painful for companies with 1,000 employees or fewer, who struggled for the time or budget to be able to take either choice.
Our solution
We decided to create a solution to this problem so many companies faced and planned to launch at Workhuman Live® in San Antonio, Texas, in May 2020.
Our product, Moodtracker, would solve these problems by offering a set of pre-configured surveys, designed by Workhuman’s data scientists. The application would automatically ensure companies asked the right questions at the right time, for free. Forever. Companies could choose to send single surveys or recurring questionnaires that would automatically generate so they could get a continuous sense of how their employees were feeling.
Moodtracker would include automatically generated recommendations and insights to help customers understand how they could improve their organisational culture.
Workhuman decided to diversify its existing infrastructure by taking a Cloud-native and mobile-first approach to the application. Moodtracker would be the first AWS-hosted Workhuman Cloud application.
Getting up and running
We got to work immediately and began to hire a dedicated team (including yours truly) to build the application. Our Workhuman Live event represented the finish line for a rapid deployment. The product team worked together closely and focused on the art of the possible.