Famous words were spoken by Julius Caesar after his victory in the battle for Zela. They feel all too appropriate, to sum up, the past week we had in Rome.

From Monday on we set out to make a longstanding wish come true. We have wanted to show off Compass to people without us having to set up an environment for a long time. Now, with the newest releases of Compass we are actually able to create the calls needed to let people land on our website and start a self-explanatory demo all by themselves.

We started off the week feeling very confident we would hammer out a cool feature that would help new customers to get introduced to Compass. That confidence was short-lived; getting to a new feature, with a new and bigger group of people, turned out to be a lot harder and more intense than expected, prior to going to the ancient city. Designing and building a new feature without restrictions meant we were enticed to envision a product that would never be ready in one week; confidence made room for the disappointment of not being able to deliver to the standards we had dreamt up. We had bitten off more than we could chew and group morale hit a temperature lower than our recently filled pool…

After leaving it for a night, doing some team bonding, and looking at it with fresh eyes in the morning we realized that our dream was not shot into pieces, it was just a bit further out than we wanted. With new courage and a lot of motivation the team pulled together and managed to deliver a demo that is not completely ready to launch but is a very good stepping stone to want we wanted to deliver.

The bonus and actually a huge win; we managed to use the newest version of Compass to make/ use features that allow us to fulfill parts of the features still on our roadmap faster. For instance, all apps that are connected in the demo use single sign-on. The principles can be used to build a single sign-on in Compass as well. Also, using the newest API calls make it possible to prefill the content. Prefilling content can be used to make the onboarding of new customers better. Next to having a demo environment, all principles we used are very applicable in our newest releases to come. In the end, all roads lead to Rome ;)

Finally, thanks to the amazing team, we were able to get the demo in the state we wanted. We have to keep it under wraps for a little while still because we are straightening out the last wrinkles. Very soon, you will be able to take your first live demo through Compass. Keep checking our feed for the latest news. Maybe it did not go as smoothly as Caesars’ victory, but we came, we saw, we conquered….that is exactly what we did.