IVY.cash needed more than an augmented team of experts - they needed someone to build and run their product and engineering operating system.
The company had patent-pending technology that could deliver NFTs with zero friction via QR scan together with Sillicon-valley VC backing from Republic Crypto and Floodgate. They had a distributed team across US and Europe ready to ship. What they didn't have was the operational infrastructure to deliver predictably while scaling.
We stepped in as the operational backbone for a 9-month engagement. This meant owning the product roadmap, building all process frameworks from scratch, managing the engineering team, and coordinating three major customer launches - all while the team began to actively ship to real customers.
The project title captures our core insight: building products and scaling products require different disciplines. Creating something new demands creativity, experimentation, and tolerance for ambiguity. Operating at scale demands clarity, repeatability, and predictable execution. Most teams are strong at one or the other. We brought both.
We transformed how the team worked—from ad-hoc coordination to predictable delivery.
The role accountability framework gave five key positions clear ownership: Business Owner driving new opportunities, Product Manager handling external stakeholders, Product Owner (our role) owning the development workflow, Lead Engineer managing technical architecture, and Engineers executing with clarity on expectations. No more confusion about who decides what.
Four operational ceremonies replaced scattered communication. Twice-weekly prioritization sessions ranked the backlog and reviewed progress. Daily refinement detailed stories and resolved architectural questions. Weekly planning looked one week ahead. Friday team updates combined business news with mini-retrospectives. The result: a distributed US/EU team that moved in sync despite timezone differences.
The Product Performance Checklist connected user actions to technical reality. When a user claims a membership token, what API calls fire? What metrics indicate success? What alerts should trigger if something breaks? This framework gave engineers clarity and gave leadership visibility.
The numbers tell the story. Figma design coverage improved from 40% to 60% to 75% across consecutive launches. Each release added capabilities: first Discover, then Discover plus BUY, then Social Sharing and Analytics on top. We managed +300 tasks through Asana with real-time dashboards showing progress. Two customer launches shipped successfully: Tory Hanna's artist NFT, Katla's NFT launch and payments integration in New York NFT event, and the Crossfit Games multi-day event prepared for multi-users and stakeholders. Each built on learnings from the previous one.
The team's own words captured the transformation best. One engineer noted that meetings had more focus. Another observed they no longer had problems with launches - they could refine the product while pursuing new customers and verticals. That's the difference between ad-hoc and operational.
We operated as a Product Owner and COO hybrid—owning the development workflow while building the infrastructure that made delivery predictable.
Every framework, drawing, and visual plan the team used to stay aligned - we created it. The role accountability matrices defining who does what. The ceremony agendas specifying outcomes and attendees. The SDK roadmap coordinating six parallel work streams across four sprints. The Platform vs. Operational Qualities framework guiding investment decisions. The 6-month delivery roadmap tracking Product, Dev, UX, and Development in parallel. These weren't reference documents collecting dust. They were the operating system the team ran on daily.
We coordinated engineers through complete delivery cycles: plan, develop, test, launch. The SDK development required managing work streams for setup and integration, core functions, new campaign types, testing, documentation, and analytics - all moving simultaneously with dependencies between them. We tracked priorities, managed re-prioritization when reality shifted, and kept the backlog clear.
People development mattered as much as task coordination. We provided structured performance feedback - what's going well, what to keep doing, what to change. We pushed engineers to engage more deeply in solutions, to communicate proactively with stakeholders, to find their professional "why." Building capability in people, not just shipping features.
Deep blockchain and NFT understanding informed every decision. This wasn't surface familiarity with buzzwords. We understood the difference between ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens and when to use each. We grasped how gas costs affect user experience. We knew how royalty mechanics work across primary and secondary markets. This knowledge shaped architecture choices, feature prioritization, and business model design throughout the engagement.
