Product Engineering for an Innovation Challenge Platform
Connecting participants, teams, administrators and judges through a coordinated product experience.
- Sector
- Innovation & Entrepreneurship
- Engagement
- Product engineering and ongoing platform development
- Focus
- Participant journeys, team workflows, submissions and evaluation
The product
StartupFair is a platform for organizing innovation Challenges and supporting the people who participate in them.
Its product journey brings together participants applying to a Challenge, teams developing their ideas, administrators managing participation, and judges reviewing submissions.
NeoSME joined as a technology development and implementation partner, building on existing product foundations and developing the application’s core workflows.
The need
The product needed to support a connected journey across several user roles.
Participants needed to understand a Challenge, complete their application and progress into team participation. Administrators needed to review applications and manage the process. Teams needed a structured way to submit their work, while judges needed a clear evaluation experience.
The engineering work involved translating these related activities into application workflows, with appropriate access and clear transitions between stages.
Our contribution
NeoSME’s work brought together architectural guidance, application development, integration work and cloud deployment.
We worked with the product team to define a practical first-release scope, develop the core participant and organizer experiences, and review how the workflows connected across the application.
The engagement also included iterative demonstrations and refinements as the team worked through real operating scenarios.
Core product areas
Participant onboarding and applications
Separate Talent and Innovator journeys support registration, qualification and applications, with administrative review as part of the participation process.
Team formation and participation
Team workflows connect selected participants with their Challenge and the group they will work with, providing a shared context for participation and submissions.
Submissions and evaluation
Submission and judging workflows connect the work teams produce with the information judges need to review and score it.
Administration
Administrative experiences bring application review, team visibility, submissions and judging activities into the platform’s operating workflow.
Role-specific experiences
Participant, administrator and judge interfaces support the different responsibilities involved in running a Challenge.
How we approached the work
Build on the existing foundation
We worked with the existing application foundations and reusable flows, focusing engineering effort on completing and connecting the core product experience.
Keep the release focused
The first phase centered on the essential Challenge journey: participation, applications, teams, submissions, evaluation and administration.
This gave the team a defined product scope around which to organize development and reviews.
Review the complete user journey
Product reviews followed activities across roles, including how a participant’s application reaches an administrator and how a team’s submission reaches a judge.
These reviews helped identify workflow gaps and guide subsequent refinements.
Continue evolving the product
The engagement includes ongoing refinement of the application as product requirements and operating needs become clearer.
Product evolution
StartupFair illustrates the work involved in advancing an early-stage product: connecting individual features into a coherent experience, supporting multiple user roles, and improving workflows through repeated review.
NeoSME’s contribution spans product implementation and the engineering decisions needed to support continued development.
Technology
Building a product of your own?
Whether you are developing your first MVP or taking an existing product to its next stage, NeoSME can help you define the scope, build the software and continue improving it.
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