“The Studio Service Project”
Here’s an article written following an interview with Julien Tassin, Tech Engineer at Voodoo
He discusses the studio service project that he worked on
“Setting up automations between HubSpot and our publishing platform’s database.”
We started the “Studio Service” project at Voodoo in September 2019 following the integration of HubSpot by the Publishing* team. The Publishing team had installed this CRM (customer relationship management) for the management of contacts from our partner studios. This allowed them to get a holistic and real-time view of our studio pipeline.
Previously, the studios had access to this data via the first version of our publishing platform. But this was not optimized, especially for the internal team who needed to automate their daily manual actions to be more responsive.
The studios contacted Publishing Associates directly, who then contacted the Legal team to organize the validation and sending of contracts. Automating this meant simplifying the existing operation to reduce the burden on our teams and make us more efficient.
To help them, the objective was to set up automations between HubSpot and our publishing platform’s database. Then, step by step, we added specific features to meet the needs of our teams and studios.
“A functional project with its constraints”
This is a project that is functional and useful to several internal and external parties: the Publishing team, the Studios and the Legal team. It links up:
- HubSpot: the Publishing team’s tool
- Spring CM and DocuSign: editing, sending and electronic signature of contracts with the studios
- the publishing platform: our blog for studios
- the “studio admin” which is the interface for the studios to manage their access and data such as addresses, users etc.
The choice of the stack naturally went to Node.js, which we already use at Voodoo and which is quite practical. On the other hand, we found ourselves quite limited by the different APIs used on the Spring CM and HubSpot.
We needed to create a link between an extremely strict database on the publishing platform side and the HubSpot tool, which had to be restricted in order to match it with the database. To overcome this, we created tools and made them available to the Publishing team and the studios, allowing us to format and formalise the expected answers as much as possible. Today, to get new leads in HubSpot, we have created specific forms for Publishing and others for Legal.
“Impact on productivity”
As early as December, we started working on the integration of Spring CM and DocuSign. Every time there was a hit on HubSpot, and the contract was validated between Publishing and the Legal teams, it was then automatically sent to the studio. A few months ago, we added what we call the “studio admin”. This interface now allows us to manage the addresses, the users of the publishing platform and the contracts signed with us.
Everything we have been able to do so far has had a real impact on the productivity of the Publishing team, especially in facilitating communications with the studios and maintaining relationships with them.
To date, we have finished opening to our in-house studios and will open it to our external Studios.
So, the in-house studios are able to:
- retrieve all game stats
- manage their access to the new platform
- submit new games
- post new videos when they make new iterations for any given ad
- be able to follow their games in the test phase and those put into production
“To match each other’s needs.”
Today with hindsight, if I had the choice I would have chosen tools with existing connectors, Spring CM / DocuSign being quite difficult to use and HubSpot is a bit too loose (the framework is not tight enough — so I ended up with operating errors due to poor handling on the user side). I would have chosen a tool with slightly less flexible framework in order to frame the subject and the users more closely.
I really liked the difficulty of setting up the project: imagining solutions to satisfy internal customers. What I liked is that I had several people using the products that were implemented resulting in positive feedback on daily use, it was quite rewarding.
Also being the sole leader of the project allowed me to manage my work the way I wanted, testing, and using the features I needed.
This project had many interesting functional challenges in order to successfully match the needs of each other.
If you would like to join our team and work on the same type of project, please do not hesitate to apply directly on our career site: https://www.voodoo.io/careers/jobs.
*Publishing: one of the activities of Voodoo, publishing the applications (games) of other studios.
