Modulist

The heart and soul of a local newspaper is its announcements section. Reading about recent births, engagements, retirements, and obituaries in the paper is what creates a sense of community for smalltown readers. Historically, this type of content was handled by the paper’s newsroom. As they’ve decreased in size, however, newsrooms have had to curtail what content they actually produce. This has resulted in clunky, inefficient processes for how newspapers receive and publish paid content. Modulist sought to streamline these processes using technology that could be utilized by any smalltown newspaper.

We worked with Modulist to create a web platform that allows individuals and businesses to send announcements and other paid content to multiple local newspapers simultaneously. Users select the type of content, publications to send it to, and dates it should run before choosing one of several premade templates to design their listing. Not only does this reduce the headaches of users, but it also cuts down on overhead for newspapers while increasing the amount of content they’re able to publish.

In January 2017, a group from Modulist met with a team from MentorMate. They laid out their idea and scoped out their business model. About a month later, that same group spent a couple of days whiteboarding everything and creating the project roadmap. After timelines, budgets, and scope were agreed upon, we spun up a development team to start tackling the project. Daily standups between the development team and the Modulist team have kept the project running smoothly ever since.

 
Additionally, the product owner and project manager have weekly one-on-one check-ins to ensure the project is adhering to the roadmap. Midway through the project, the project manager on the team decided to pursue a new opportunity outside of MentorMate. We seamlessly transitioned a new PM into the project without losing any momentum.