Underground navigation, emergency alert, and VoIP communication app for mining

The company, an established MiningTech company headquartered in Spain, needed to solve this challenge: “an underground navigation app with emergency alerts and VoIP communication between miners and the control room.” The in-house team was junior and had no established working methodology, which created delays that were hard to anticipate on a project critical to people's safety. As a company with no prior experience in software projects, it also had no internal way to assess whether development was progressing at the pace and quality needed before deploying it in the mine.

Squad Challenge ran 6 challenges tailored to the project's critical profiles —offline navigation, IoT telemetry, real-time VoIP communication, and mobile development—, with processes taking between 5 and 10 days depending on the complexity of each profile, ultimately bringing on 15 remote professionals evaluated against the business case itself.

Squad Hiring managed, within 24h, the AOR-based hiring of the 15 professionals validated through Squad Challenge, handling contract generation adapted to each developer's country of origin, data validation, and the onboarding process.

Squad Master AI was a key piece of the management: since the company had no prior experience with software projects, its dashboards gave leadership an objective view of real progress, code quality, and each squad member's individual performance, without relying on internal technical judgment.

The Enabling Team brought in a varied set of profiles —Agile Coach, DevOps Manager, Technical Lead, and Product Owner— and organized the squad as a tribe with different chapters, with a flexible management methodology adapted to the company's traditional hierarchical environment, including periodic reporting systems connected to its regular committees.The project brought on 15 remote professionals (mobile, backend, VoIP, IoT/telemetry, QA, and Tech Lead) working on a stack of Node.js (NestJS), Kotlin (Android), WebRTC/SIP, MQTT, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, GitLab, and Azure. The company had no in-house technical team with software experience, so this squad, together with the Enabling Team, operated as the product's engineering core. The project has been active for more than 20 months, with 20% annual turnover that Squadmakers manages through new rounds of Squad Challenge and Squad Hiring.