“The quest for talent is real,” said Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice. “We want to make space accessible to all.”
The tech world loves a visionary who sees their work as one giant leap for mankind, but every successful company knows that no product launch is successful without a talented team on the ground. The Sierra Space team is building just that, as they prepare to launch the Dream Chaser spaceplane in partnership with NASA in early 2023.
“We are recruiting talented individuals from all walks of life who have the tenacity to turn big dreams into reality,” Vice said.
Completing ambitious projects, whether earthbound or skyward, creates opportunities for individuals to succeed by forging strong bonds between colleagues and promoting a sense of ownership over work.
For instance, Travelers Haven empowered their “Slay The Dragon” team to conquer complex challenges in launching a new customer relationship management interface, while Vivian Health approached their cold start problem with a cross-functional team.
Built In Colorado sat down with Vice and local tech leaders from Travelers Haven, Vivian Health, Tilled and CampMinder to learn about the teams propelling their recent product launches — and the unique approaches they used along the way.
Sierra Space Corporation builds space systems and components in order to make space more accessible to more people.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
Our Dream Chaser® spaceplane, which is set to launch in early 2023 on a series of NASA missions to resupply the International Space Station, is the first in a fleet of space vehicles and the world’s only winged commercial spaceplane. It heads to space on top of a conventional rocket and then glides gently back to Earth, landing on any compatible commercial airport runway worldwide. We are enabling the future of space transportation with this vehicle, which will eventually carry crew and work towards building new commercial space destinations in the latter half of the decade. Our ultimate goal is to create multiple platforms in space to benefit life here on Earth, and we envisage a future where hundreds of people are living and working in space.
When others say something cannot be done, we show that it can.”
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
Sierra Space is undergoing massive growth and to support that we are recruiting a thousand additional team members this year at sites across the United States. We are expanding in Colorado, Wisconsin, North Carolina and on the Space Coast of Florida. We want to attract the brightest minds with a pioneering spirit to help us fulfill our vision, get the Dream Chaser to space and ultimately build an entire fleet of spaceplanes and new commercial destinations in low Earth orbit. When others say something cannot be done, we show that it can.
Vivian Health is a transparency-focused jobs marketplace for healthcare professionals.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
In early 2021, we set out to expand beyond our fast-growing job marketplace which connects healthcare professionals with top employers. Through our research, we concluded that our users wanted to understand whether they were being paid a competitive salary and to understand which job markets were the strongest in the country. Up to this point, most pay data for the healthcare industry was not publicly available and so clinicians were not empowered to negotiate better contracts for themselves. We decided to change that by building Salary Insights, a product that empowers healthcare professionals with up-to-date and accurate pay transparency.
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
Our biggest challenge was solving the cold start problem, which occurs when you have to start with little to no historical data in order to provide accurate predictions.
What is a cold start?
At its core, the feature aimed to accurately predict the average salary of the vast majority of healthcare workers across disciplines and in any US city. Given the potential for hundreds of thousands of combinations of job types and cities, it becomes extremely difficult to provide accurate salary reports at scale.
We needed to live up to our promise of pay transparency. The cross-functional team across product, data, design and engineering decided to combine real historical employer pay data from our job marketplace, our active user base and government databases and then deployed a machine learning model that could consistently and accurately predict salaries and provide them to our 650k+ healthcare professionals on the platform.
Tilled provides services that allow B2B software companies to run their own pay facilitation.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
In March of this year, Tilled was proud to launch white-labeling, enabling our partners to customize elements of the Tilled platform with their own company branding. With this solution, our partners can easily add their logos and brand colors to the merchant applications and even create a subdomain to personalize the payment experience to their business, while also going to market quickly with a powerful platform that has all the tools they and their customers need.
Anytime you allow for customization on your platform, you have to be flexible with design.”
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
Anytime you allow for customization on your platform, you have to be flexible with design. Our first challenge was to come up with a design that would create the experience we wanted for our partners. We spent a lot of time creating standards that would allow our partner’s branding to shine.
We also faced challenges in allowing our partners to create custom subdomains. We had to solve the technical challenges of deploying our software to other servers and accounting for individual customization needs. This took us some time, but we were able to build a solution that is both scalable and also meets our high standards of security. As a result, our partners are able to make payments feel like a true part of their offering.
CampMinder is a software company building tools to streamline business operations for summer camp management.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
In March of 2022, CampMinder launched a new venue rental and event management platform called Gazebo. Many summer camps offer rentals and events in the non-summer months, and Gazebo is an integrated solution that allows us to serve our customers in the summer camp industry year-round.
Gazebo is also an opportunity for us to reach beyond the summer camp industry and provide a software solution that works for retreat centers, conference centers, wedding venues and more. Gazebo allows customers to create custom contracts, tasks and reminders, process payments and manage inventory. Our goal is to help operators and organizers create more (and better) shared experiences. We believe that the ritual of getting people together creates our strongest, most valued memories, and Gazebo exists to help preserve the traditions and celebrations that make us who we are.
Creating and launching Gazebo was a really exciting moment.”
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
Creating and launching Gazebo was a really exciting moment in CampMinder’s trajectory, and there was a ton of energy behind it. We had to balance our desire to go big and acknowledge that building the launch step-by-step was in our best interest.
Instead of building a complete custom website, we leveraged a landing page solution that enabled us to go live sooner while still tracking key analytics. We started marketing to the segment of our current client base that had already expressed interest and spent time doing keyword research that would help us widen that reach eventually. We created materials for the conferences we were already sponsoring to see how Gazebo would resonate with the summer camp industry, where we already have a great reputation and name recognition.
Travelers Haven manages corporate housing and short-term rentals for nomadic workers.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
The organization of client data is a crucial part of Travelers Haven's ability to serve nomadic workers across the country. In May 2022, our team produced a fully functional and company-customized customer relationship management (CRM) tool to improve Travelers Haven’s data management and information integrity. Associates now have the ability to retrieve, sort and report on data faster than ever before.
Improved internal reporting will allow management teams to track key performance indicators, identify areas of risk and manage even the most complex guest issue cases efficiently, accurately and with care. Associates will be able to change how they communicate internally in order to move the process forward faster.
Associates will be able to change how they communicate internally in order to move the process forward faster.”
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
Our internally-named “Slay The Dragon” project contended with the complexity of building company-wide process flows from scratch within the CRM platform. Our largest obstacle was the communication between Salesforce and the Travelers Haven portal. Constant communication with both internal and external development teams meant that the complex coding required to get the two programs to “speak” to each other could be managed in a well-ordered and structured manner. The pride shown by all contributing colleagues goes to show that together, we can all thrive.
