Methodology

We don’t just build whatever comes our way. We’ve got to love the idea and feel it will make a massive difference in the market and for your business. The first step is to hand-pick only the best projects. No matter how good the idea sounds or how confident our client is, we put the app through a rigorous vetting process, polishing and streamlining the idea along the way.

Our team stress-tests every project that comes through Rivet Hammer’s doors. We work with you to understand why your idea makes sense, why it’s going to be successful, why anyone would care about it. This is where our expert strategists will challenge assumptions and overhaul business plans.

We ask tough questions while seeing the possibility and potential for what we can create together. Only then, are we ready to start planning, designing and building anything. During the vetting process, we’ll assess fit, you’ll learn about us and we’ll learn about you and decide if our cultures and work styles fit together. From there, we can decide if it makes sense to move forward and build something incredibly special together.

A discovery sprint is a focused 2-4 day session, similar to our Roadmapping process, to clarify your project’s technical and business requirements. Whether conducted remotely or in person, this phase answers the critical question: “What exactly should we build?”.

Long before coding begins, we dive deeply into your business goals, ROI measures, user needs, risks, and future opportunities. Through collaborative discussions, workflows, and user stories, we define clear requirements and personas, laying the groundwork for our design and development teams to begin building your software.

Together we’ll define, explore and document all aspects of the product you want to create including:

Review of current system(s), Business ecosystem mapping, Competitive analysis, Existing product audit , User research and interviews , User personas

Successful projects depend on clear upfront scoping, achieved through collaboration. We capture your requirements, define specific goals, deliverables, tasks, and deadlines, then document these thoroughly. The outcome is a Functional Specification Document (FSD)—a plain-English guide outlining how your platform works—alongside a user story backlog and estimated sprint count.

We deeply understand your business, customers, and product users, identifying innovative solutions and features. By creating user personas and scenarios, we ensure every solution directly addresses your customers’ pain points and provides maximum value.

Ultimately, the Project Scoping phase aligns our vision, establishing a clear development path forward. Deliverables include the Functional Specification Document, Story Map, User Story Backlog, and Estimated Project Budget.

In the Platform Architecture phase, we carefully design the overall architecture and technology stack for your app, ensuring alignment with both immediate needs and future product goals. We thoroughly analyze requirements outlined in the Functional Specification Document (FSD), evaluating structural and navigational elements, performance demands, scalability, and security considerations.

Our experienced team can build software solutions across various languages, technology stacks, and platforms—covering both web and mobile. Rather than limiting you to a particular set of technologies, our flexible approach ensures we choose the best tools and frameworks tailored specifically to your business objectives and long-term vision.

Before we ship your app, we run it through a final User Acceptance Testing process. We perform end-to-end testing with real or simulated users in order to ensure the complete system achieves your business goals. Once our Quality Assurance team gives us the green light, your app is ready for launch!

All the work and effort put into making your application a reality would all be for naught if it’s unreachable or buckles under load. We can configure servers and work with your IT staff to ensure scalability and monitoring. When your product is ready, Rivet Hammer helps you bring it to the world—deploying it to the cloud provider, getting approval from the App store, or integrating it into your company’s infrastructure.

Deployment and Launch – With sign off on all sides, we’re ready to push to production and/or submit to respective app stores. We’ll work with you every step of the way to make sure the launch is a success. When it’s time to hand off the product over to your team, we’ll offer training and maintenance to ensure a smooth transition.