Griddo: the solution the education sector deserves

The ongoing Secuoyas-IE collaboration has crystallised into a remarkable publishing product, Griddo.

Industry
- Education
Client
- IE University
Skills
- Design system
- Product development
- Research
- Strategist planning
- Visual design
Team
- 2x Product Designer
- 1x QA
- 2x Developer
- 1x Project Manager
Date
- 2007 - present

No findings without hard work

Our relationship with IE dates back to 2007. Secuoyas has accompanied IE in its digital growth through several transformations. In addition, parallel projects for other clients in the EDTECH sector such as Oxford University Press have given us a greater vision and understanding of the needs of the sector, from our position as specialists and interaction designers. All this accumulated experience in the education sector makes us true experts in the field.

How we did it

The Instituto de Empresa is a leading organisation with seven major schools or training centres. Divided into dozens of different programmes with regular communication support needs in the form of minisites and events. Each school gives its best each year, seeking to find young international talent and entice them to come to the IE Campus in Madrid or Segovia to take the programmes, or even to receive them remotely.

Continuously reinventing itself with the highest quality and communicating effectively online are the pillars of IE's educational offerings.

A collaborative project

From a basic modular framework structure previously devised by IE, Secuoyas created the necessary ecosystem to get it rolling and turn it into a viable project.

As a first step, all the design work was unified through a style guide, establishing clear boundaries between what could and should be done. Giving entity to an increasingly coherent branding.

Needs for change

The developers team was consolidated and a stable development environment was defined on which to grow. The set of plugins, themes and first modules were moved from a single-site to a multi-site, evolving them and creating transversality between schools. Then the business structure was defined, the collaborative framework from which the teams on each side could understand each other and row in the same direction. This was the end of colossal planning. The "single product" mental model was instilled. And step by step, task by task, IE's product owners could alter the course of each school by meeting their constant publication goals. Within the project management platform Taiga and applying the Kanban system, we unified their requests with the pipeline of work in progress of both the visual designers and the developers in charge of integration into the final CMS.

It works

The team

A team of 12 people between IE and Secuoyas dedicated entirely to the programme.

Projects

Developed in one year.

Sites

Thirty sites published between September 2017 and August 2018.

System design

Nearly 100 different modules make up the site ecosystem

See Griddo in action

More than partners

The data speaks for itself, IE's marketing department has managed to reduce the business-critical Time to market from an average of 2 years of development per business school, to publishing ALL schools in a single year. The evolution of the publishing product enables organic growth of each of the schools. But the real operational achievement is based on a perfect symbiosis of the team at each end, supported by the agile philosophy, with Kanban as the process, and enhanced by improved communication.