Every time you build a project, you are building something new, and you have no data to base decisions on. One of the first tasks any developer has to do to prepare a app for launch is integrate analytics, and often time, A/B testing.

What that usually looks like is vetting and integrating a variety of 3rd party services that make your app code clunky, take a hit on your performance and leaves you data scattered across different platforms. Overall, it takes time and effort to ultimately hamper your app's user experience.

I built Pivotal as an answer to this problem.

Pivotal Software

To allow users to no longer integrate a bunch of tools, I build Pivotal in 2 parts.

The framework integration libraries

The centralized intelligence repository.

I started by building an A/B Library for Laravel, since that is my framework of choice, and also has a very large community. The library would handle the A/B testing and local data analytics. Optionally, the user has the ability to integrate the A/B library with Pivotal Intelligence, which provides API endpoints for the library to share A/B testing analytics and provides more powerful suite of analytics data. From charts, and trends, to carve outs and additional supplemental data.

Pivotal services were also built using Laravel. Safe data ingestion was critical to mission success, so the API layer that handles all library data was the starting point.

After data was correctly processed, building tools around that data became a product oriented goal. People want power, yes, but they also want answers. So I made the decision to make simplifying analytics the goal.

A user has the ability to see trends, and gain insights without having to configure a bunch of charts and graphs.

This serves as a perfect example of how product and engineering an inherently intertwined. And good decisions need to be made at both levels to build great products.