work

Crain Communications

Axioned as Digital User Experiences Partner

The Client

Crain is one of the largest privately-owned business media companies in the US. Across North America, Europe and Asia, some six million business leaders rely on Crain for the news, stories, and insights that shape their decisions.

Crain brands include:

  • AdAge
  • Automotive News
  • Pensions & Investments
  • Modern Healthcare, and many more

What They Needed

In 2015, Agile/Scrum development teams at Crain Communications (servicing the websites of various Crain brands) needed to increase the velocity of their Sprints, in order to “get more done”. To this end, Crain choose Axioned as their working partner.

Originally, we had up to 5 PHP/Drupal developers and testers engaged to augment their in-house team; overlapping work hours between time zones for real-time correspondence and stand-ups/meetings.

Today, in 2021, we continue to support the user-experience quality assurance efforts of various Crain Communication brands.

The Solution

With our initial engagement, we held interviews – in conjunction with the head of Crain Communications’ Scrum Teams – to pull together the right technical talent from within Axioned’s engineering team.

With Crain’s team members from New York and Detroit fully acquainted with Axioned’s team members from Mumbai we were off and running!

To this day, Axioned team members continue to work remotely with Crain team members, facilitated by the following tools:

  • Vagrant
  • Atlassian, JIRA
  • Atlassian, BitBucket
  • Slack
  • Zoom and Google Hangouts

The Result

With our teams acting as an extension of Crain’s own internal teams, the client was able to unlock the full technical and cost saving benefits of our partnership.

This also freed their team up to get other projects off the ground; projects which until now had been side-lined. Feature development for Crain’s websites was enhanced and the debugging process became more thorough.