Enabling Product Development and Digital Transformation with AWS Amplify

Introduction

Clarivol came to us with a vision for digital transformation of part of their existing in-person process for life strategy sessions. The Clarivol team has over 20 years of experience and success doing organizational strategy consulting and individual life strategy sessions for teams and individuals of all kinds. Whether its a 1,000 member division of a Fortune 500, a startup, or a grad student, Clarivol has the experience and insight to bolster success by developing and partnering on workable strategies and giving clarity of vision to those at a crossroads.

Customer Challenge

The challenge was that we had to deliver an online “self-serve” product experience that delivered an experience of similar quality to the in-person consulting, all without any major Clarivol team interaction. Clarivol was nervous about ensuring user experience (UX) didn’t decrease, while still being able to offload and automate the work involved in delivering strategic guidance to customers.

Solution Details

Clarivol’s first digital product, Unique Talents, came to life through a collaboration between Clarivol and our full-service product development team. We worked with Clarivol to take an iterative approach to releasing a meaningful Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of what will become a much larger suite of experiences called Clarivol U.

To deliver the production use MVP of the first module, we implemented a robust discovery and planning phase by coordinating with Clarivol to ensure they were able to clearly communicate their vision to us via discovery workshops, collaborative flow diagramming, and user story writing exercises. We enabled Clarivol to visually communicate their ideas about the user experience by teaching them to use Lucidchart and other visual planning processes to ensure we were able to glean the UX insights we needed to deliver on their vision from a technical perspective.

Once the MVP vision was clearly defined and prioritized we got to work building a prototype. The prototyping phase focused on using Material UI as a front-end to avoid wasting design and front-end development time while we were still getting the user experience clearly delivered according to Clarivol’s goals. For the server-side, we started with Ruby on Rails and later moved to AWS Amplify’s full-stack offering to deliver the MVP.

By using the Amplify ecosystem, we were able to make the application a fully serverless application and reap the benefits of highly elastic and reliable AWS services like DynamoDB, Cognito, Lambda, and S3.

Why Serverless?

Shifting to a serverless approach allowed us to deliver a scalable solution while avoiding the costs of “always on” infrastructure and the associated maintenance and security costs. Reducing costs at this phase helped us bias all of the work towards Clarivol’s unique value proposition.

Over a period of an intensive few months, we delivered the MVP into production on AWS Amplify, including implementation of a production-appropriate design overhaul to ensure the experience was deeply rooted in the Clarivol brand and ready for public consumption.

Customer Success

This Summer (2022), we launched the first Clarivol U module, Unique Talents, into production and the launch was a success. The response from both end users and the Clarivol U team was hopeful and excited for the future. Laura, co-owner and co-founder of Clarivol had this to say about our collaboration: