Optimizely Coaching and Co-Development

Optimizely is a powerful tool capable of some amazing content wrangling. The question becomes whether your existing .NET development team is positioned to provide ongoing support for your new Optimizely install, or for a legacy Episerver site. Do you need help with a complex integration? Do you need someone to help bring your development up to speed with the system, or to provide a graceful handoff once the project is complete?

At Blend, we understand this landscape, because it's what we do. We recognize the value in ensuring your internal team is ready to take on ownership of the implementation — to provide guidance and coaching, rather than a cold handoff. Which is why we provide Optimizely Coaching: our solution for helping your team feel comfortable and confident through your project’s development and far into its future.

Turning Your Team into an Optimizely Team

Blend's history and experience developing custom Optimizely solutions equips us to provide top-shelf co-development with your organization's existing development team. Our goal is to set you up for success — both with this engagement and beyond.

What this all means is that Blend is uniquely positioned to fill in the gaps of your team's knowledge or capacity. And, we do it all with one goal in mind: handing over the keys whenever you're ready.

Optimizely coaching includes:

• Strategic planning on how to prioritize and collaborate on your project.
• Coaching on how Optimizely's standard features — and products like Content Recommendations, Web Experimentation, and Feature Experimentation — will co-exist with your custom integrations.
• Ongoing co-development with Blend's Optimizely team, including consultation with our team of fully-certified Optimizely developers.
• Defined success factors as Blend gradually hands over more and more of the development load.

Your custom implementation. Our decades of combined experience.

What does a standard coaching engagement look like? It all depends on what you need.

To begin, Blend's strategy and development teams will work with you to understand where we can best fit. We will define the goals of Optimizely coaching, which could include:

• Bringing an existing .NET development team up to speed
• Helping familiarize a new .NET development team with the site and system
• Staying up to date on monthly Optimizely releases and providing guidance on the applicability of changes
• Implementation of complex functionality while coaching on the base installation

With this strategic coaching roadmap in place, we work toward a common coaching plan. Feature development, co-development, code review, and periodic benchmarks help ensure we're working toward your goals of Optimizely independence.

Optimizely Coaching for Developers (pdf)

Learn how Blend can help your development team get up to speed on Optimizely (formerly Episerver)

.pdf, 443.33 KB

In other words, we can reach in two directions. We can take on the heavy lifting and help set you up for support, or we can provide on-the-spot guidance as needed — or, anywhere in between.

Always ready to tackle your biggest tasks.

While Optimizely Coaching is designed to help empower your internal development team, we also know that big, hairy problems sprout up from time to time. You're in luck: we love solving complex content problems.

Blend is always available to help assist with the more difficult and complicated parts of a custom Optimizely implementation — it's what our company was built upon — and we do so in a way that passes support knowledge on to your team. With or without Optimizely Coaching, Blend is available to co-develop — or, fully take on — the biggest tasks in your development roadmap, including:

• Development of custom features / complex Optimizely problems 
• Integration and guidance on search through Optimizely Search & Navigation or Solr
• Implementation of Optimizely Content Recommendations or other Optimizely tools
• Implementation of site monitoring and quality services, such as SiteImprove
• Implementation of your chosen digital asset management (DAM) system

Let’s get started!

Every project is different. Every team is different. Our intent is to understand what goals you’re trying to reach so we can determine how we can best use our experience to get you there.